Rhetoric. Culture. Unfortunate Design.
Imagining Campus: Landscape in American Higher Education
May 11, 2023
When you think of a college campus, what do you see?
If you live in the United States, there’s a good chance you see an abundance of trees, tall and old, their branches and leaves encircling buildings that resemble centuries-old manor houses or monasteries. Connecting these buildings are shaded walkways meticulously groomed by an army of landscapers or worn organically into the grass by decades of students charting their own way across campus.
Perhaps you see various incarnations of The Quad, a central plaza linking the campus’ oldest and most historic buildings. Flowers in the spring or, even better, autumn leaves underfoot as students rush to and from class, the library, a party, or a football game. In wet climates, duck boots and umbrellas. In cold climates, snow boots, wool scarves and hats, and whatever passes for a puffer jacket that year. The ubiquitous backpack.
And tweed! All that tweed. If not literal, these tweed jackets exist in the imaginations of countless students, many of them would-be professors too naive to know yet that a professor’s life is anything but solitude, coffee shops, and well-used but impeccably tailored tweed jackets with elbow patches.
This image may not reflect the college campuses you’ve visited or where you’ve studied or worked. No matter. These campuses are more fantasy than reality – imaginative landscapes onto which we project what we want to see when we think of college. The power of American higher education springs as much from what we imagine when we think of a campus than from what we see or experience when we visit an actual campus.
American colleges and universities have a complex history, one that does not easily fit into a cookie-cutter image of manor houses, tweed, and graceful landscaping. Colleges such as Harvard and Yale were established in Colonial times to mold the sons of privilege into clerics, lawyers, and gentlemen. These have now become among the most competitive and wealthiest institutions in the world. Top-notch research and teaching institutions to be sure, but one wonders how much of that costly tuition is paid for the name of the school and the doors it will open and not for the education the new children of privilege receive there. All that ivy packs a powerful social and economic punch.
Alongside the future Ivy League, eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century liberal arts colleges were founded. In general, these schools and their Ivy League kin emphasized classical and modern languages, history, art, law, theology, and the proto-sciences – in short, the disciplines we still call the liberal arts. These schools left little room for the vocational training needed to establish a career beyond law, medicine, the church, or gentlemanly leisure. That was left to Colonial and early American evening schools, apprenticeships and, later, the earliest for-profits, which existed long before the University of Phoenix sprang up.
War, however, has a way of changing things. In 1862, the Morrill Act was passed, more precisely known as “an Act donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.” Ensuring a steady food supply and mastering the mechanic arts become very popular when a nation faces the existential threat of civil war. Not surprisingly, “military tactics” were included in the 1862 Bill, this area of study present for obvious reasons as the American Civil War raged.
Following the Civil War, weary veterans perhaps saw little benefit in a classical education but were interested in engineering, agriculture, and other applied fields that the Morrill Act fostered. At this time, elective courses were not the stereotypical liberal arts add-ons that inhabit today’s fever-brain collective consciousness. No, at first, electives were the engineering, agriculture, and other STEM courses that would, in a century, form the core of many college majors. Vocational education was moving from apprenticeships, evening schools, and for-profits to the center of American higher education. The mechanic arts that drove the Civil War were also useful to a rapidly industrializing country and the vast, open territories of the American West. The new electives became key to a nation building ever more factories and plowing its way (invited or not) across a continent.
A further Morrill Act was passed in 1890, requiring that race not be a factor in admission. States that did not wish to eliminate race as a barrier to admission had the weaselly option of opening separate institutions for people of color. This lead to the establishment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well as, indirectly in many cases, colleges and universities that provided vital higher education access to the country’s Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Irish, Jewish, Eastern European, Southern European, and other immigrants without a WASP background.
When Johns Hopkins opened in 1876, founded on the German model of doctoral education and specialized research, American higher education evolved once more from its Colonial origins. Sprawling intellectual powerhouses emerged in the 20th century and dominate higher education to this day. These universities in the modern sense were, at first, far from open to students of any background but, perhaps due to their sheer size and resulting need for students, eventually opened the doors of the academy to hundreds of thousands of students.
And yet, despite higher education’s many transformations, a surprisingly coherent image of the college campus has taken hold of the American imagination. It is a powerful image, and if asked to describe a college campus, a good number of Americans would describe the same stately buildings, shady trees, and tweed-clad professors and students crunching autumn leaves on their way to class.
To be fair, many schools cultivate this image of the private, secluded space. View the websites and marketing brochures of almost any American college or university, and there they are – the trees, the manicured lawns, the majestic buildings.
Why do so many colleges and universities go to great lengths to bring the fantasy to life? Beyond glossy brochures and web pages, why do so many campuses resemble the set of the latest Jane Austen or Bronte movie? Why are these campuses embedded within park-like grounds set apart from the communities that host them? For that matter, why are so many of these surrounding communities among the most neglected, impoverished parts of a college town?
The park-like grounds perhaps echo the original meaning of campus, Latin for field (benefits of a classical education). It bears remembering that in the U.S. at least, these grounds were once used as military parade grounds. Or, these parks might recall the enclosures that once turned England’s common, public fields into private spaces owned by the landed gentry. Regardless of their origin, college campuses tend to be secluded and set apart, with their own borders. These borders are physical but also imaginative, figurative yet powerful nonetheless.
U.S. colleges and universities have always been evolving, have always been in flux, constantly reinventing themselves. One wonders, though if these disruptive forces can ever shake the collective image of what a college or university should be, at least in our imagination.
Sources & Further Reading
Geiger, Roger L. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Geiger, Roger L. American Higher Education Since World War II: A History. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Leslie, W. Bruce. Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the Age of the University. Routledge, 2005.
Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. Third Edition. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America. First published in 1918. Republished by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Veysey, Laurence. The Emergence of the American University. University of Chicago Press, 1965.