Spring Break
Construction highlights changes in CSU campus community
Anne Marie Merline
Issue date: 2/23/09 Section: Opinion
While you are on campus, are you building walls or tearing them down?
Teaching in the Academic Village for the past year and a half, I cannot be shielded from construction on the southwest end of campus. There is a third building going up as I write. I walk past it to and from AV-B where I teach.
This idea of building gets me thinking about the philosophical and physical history of the building of higher education through the ages -- about the beauty of the buildings on college campuses around the world and in the U.S. and about the ugliness of those who have been denied access over these walls through the ages.
Except for last half of the twentieth century in U.S. history, looking specifically at the time of the founding of the first institution of higher education in Bologna Italy in 1088 (no, that is not a typo), there has been a history of rich, well-connected men finding their place in the world.
In the U.S., higher education has had a slow and sometimes brutal history of everyone else trying to gain entrance and fair treatment in the classroom.
The Marxist in me makes me think about the men (I have yet to see a woman on the job site) who are building these walls, their level of education and how they are selling their labor to house those who will become educated within these walls starting in the fall.
More important than the physical plant is the way that we build walls around the acceptance of new ideas or people that we do not know. I wonder if you, as a student, are trying to walk beside these people with new ideas, or are you indeed securing yourself within your own mortar to keep these people and ideas out?
Before the Academic Village was built, Summit Hall was built in 2004. Before that, the last residence halls to be built were Durwood and Westfall in 1968 and 1969. This was necessary to accommodate the new mass influx of the middle class to campus, as was reflected in the history of higher education as a whole.
Teaching in the Academic Village for the past year and a half, I cannot be shielded from construction on the southwest end of campus. There is a third building going up as I write. I walk past it to and from AV-B where I teach.
This idea of building gets me thinking about the philosophical and physical history of the building of higher education through the ages -- about the beauty of the buildings on college campuses around the world and in the U.S. and about the ugliness of those who have been denied access over these walls through the ages.
Except for last half of the twentieth century in U.S. history, looking specifically at the time of the founding of the first institution of higher education in Bologna Italy in 1088 (no, that is not a typo), there has been a history of rich, well-connected men finding their place in the world.
In the U.S., higher education has had a slow and sometimes brutal history of everyone else trying to gain entrance and fair treatment in the classroom.
The Marxist in me makes me think about the men (I have yet to see a woman on the job site) who are building these walls, their level of education and how they are selling their labor to house those who will become educated within these walls starting in the fall.
More important than the physical plant is the way that we build walls around the acceptance of new ideas or people that we do not know. I wonder if you, as a student, are trying to walk beside these people with new ideas, or are you indeed securing yourself within your own mortar to keep these people and ideas out?
Before the Academic Village was built, Summit Hall was built in 2004. Before that, the last residence halls to be built were Durwood and Westfall in 1968 and 1969. This was necessary to accommodate the new mass influx of the middle class to campus, as was reflected in the history of higher education as a whole.
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