Wesley College Wednesday: Five Fragments
Five fragments relevant to the Wesley College Documentation Project today.
Fragment One
Universities are diverse places. This is both good and a challenge. On the one hand, the diversity of an American university is part of its strength. They’re dynamic and heterogeneous and allow students and faculty to share ideas across professional, disciplinary, and epistemological boundaries.
On the other hand, this kind of diversity generates all kinds of inefficiencies and frictions. Something as seemingly simple as determining whether faculty members are “productive” or not often gets mired in complexity as it runs up against the wide range of academic, professional, creating, and scholarly outputs each discipline and department recognizes. Teaching likewise is fraught with incommensurability. Some disciplines and programs can teach massive classes or in an online environment with little risk to quality of learning. Other programs simply cannot find efficiencies in larger class sizes (think languages, music, or flight instruction).
Despite this complexity, universities have long sought to find certain common denominators that can be applied across campus. The most common one, of course, is FTE, which is shorthand for an accounting of student credit hours produced, but that really is just a metonym for money (or more properly cost). Universities have also looked to square footage as a means to compare various different programs and departments. The limitations of this are obvious with certain programs requiring labs and others requiring little more than offices and classrooms. At the same time, it suggests a certain comparability of spaces across campus, which like instruction and research isn’t really the case. At the same time, it does exert a kind of downward pressure on campus space that seeks to limit specialized environments unless they are absolutely necessary.
This tendency toward producing efficient spaces is part the legacy of modernity on college campuses which whatever their founding myths in inspiration, religion, Gothic mysticism, or creativity, tend to be organized according to the logic of the assembly line. Students move through their college with a kind of systematic efficiencies and encounter knowledge types, methods, practices, and experiences in an orderly fashion that not only promises a high quality product (that is a well educated student), but also an efficient encounter.
At the same time, college campuses are designed to inspire. College architecture whether guided by Gothic, modernist, Colonial, or other cues, is rarely crassly functionalist or easily reduced to square footage. At the same time, when opportunities arise, spaces designed to inspire can be converted to more functional roles on campus.
The parlor in Sayre Hall is a nice example of this. Originally designed as an expression of genteel domesticity amid the ordered space of dormitory living, the space was modified to serve a more practical role on campus, most recently, as a computer room for the campus technologies group. To do this, one of the arched grandiose doors was removed, the trim on the coffered ceiling was removed and a drop ceiling installed, and the terrazzo and mosaic floors were covered with commercial grade wall-to-wall carpeting.
Fragment Two
Despite efforts to overwrite and convert spaces for more practical purposes, there is this subtle tendency for the past to push through in neglected corners and unexpected places. For example, there are traces of a painted Greek key pattern preserved on the walls of the fourth floor of Sayre Hall in a small antechamber that leads to Robertson Hall.
Fragment Three
One of the most interesting things to observe in the Wesley College buildings are all the little efforts to improvise that allow otherwise compromised elements of the building to continue to function.
Fragment Four
The conversation surrounding the remodeling of Corwin/Larimore Hall in the late 1970s is interesting because it relates to creating functional spaces for a department. In the documents that describe this move, two issues come to the fore. First, somehow modifying Corwin/Larimore for psychology would – somehow – improve the department’s research productivity. Second, some folks were worried that moving a department to buildings on the margins of campus (at that time) would marginalize the department and impair their ability to attract students and interact with colleagues. During the various – and protracted – conversations regarding the adaptation and remodeling of Corwin/Larimore, square footage of the rooms continued to be central to the plans.
Fragment Five
Andrew Alexis Varvel out in Bismarck has started to produce a series of press releases that tells the story of Wesley College. They’re pretty interesting and a great primer for anyone who is unfamiliar with the history of this distinctive institution. I’ve added the links to these documents below.
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