Living in Public [Speaking of Places]

Living in Public Carol T. Christ It’s not a glamorous metaphor, but I’m often tempted to liken my role as a college president to that of a landlord or small-town mayor. The constituents may be different, but the contexts are much the same: thousands of diverse individuals, living and working in proximity, leading essen- tially private lives in a communal setting. That point was driven home to me when a noise dispute between students in adjoining rooms — neighboring tenants, so to speak — helped ignite campus-wide demonstrations about racism. What seemed a personal conflict between a black and a white student quickly became symbolic of the college’s attitude toward race. When people live together in a com- munity, interactions that are fundamentally private and personal, the stuff of daily life, are transfigured quickly into public issues. Since becoming the top administrator several years ago at Smith College, a small, independent, liberal-arts institution, I have given a great deal of thought to private and public space. The history of political protest at my former institution — the University of California at Berke- ley, where I served as Provost — has made that institution almost synonymous with the public staging of issues. Its campus has a flamboyant, often theatrical, tradition of public debate. Sproul Plaza, the great open space on which the Free Speech Movement took shape in 1964, symbol- izes Berkeley. That era in the campus’s history defines an important element of its culture. Issues get debated, vigorously, in public space; the private lives of students are almost invisible. Although Berkeley may occupy an extreme on the political spectrum, its tradition of public debate is very much part of the culture of virtually all of our public institutions. The situation at most private colleges is quite differ- ent. In those residential enclaves, the private, indeed, predominates. At Smith, for example, the spaces that most resonantly define the college for its alumnae — and often for prospective students — are the houses, designed to look like family homes, in which 95 percent of students live. Smith’s founders intended this system of residential hous- ing — called the “cottage system,” in contrast to a “con- gregate system” that housed all college activities, including residential quarters in a single building — to integrate stu- dents in the residential and familial life of the town. This house system shapes campus culture; at commencement students receive their diplomas not in alphabetical order, or by order of their major, but by house. Smith students’ experience of living in a relatively small, home-like setting Students congregate at the entrance to the new student center at Smith College. Photo courtesy of Weiss/Manfredi Architects. Photographer Jeff Goldberg/ESTO. creates deep institutional loyalty and provides an impor- tant entry point for new students into the campus at large. However, the intense private communities of the houses and their centrality to institutional identity can sometimes make it difficult to create public spaces for robust debate. Building Public Space I have come to believe that public space is vital to build- ing a healthy and rich sense of diversity — diversity not only in racial and economic terms, but of political opinion, religious belief, sexual orientation, and cultural back- ground. Such space provides an opportunity for people to disagree about matters of political conviction without personalizing the debate. That is particularly true at this moment in academic life, when students come to college steeped in the politics of identity and affiliation, and suspi- cious that disagreement could be expressed or received in anything but personal terms. In part, public space is just that: a physical space. In designing Sproul Plaza, for example, its architects made a deliberate attempt to create the kind of public square characteristic of European cities, and to bring the pattern of surrounding city streets into the campus itself. The Free Speech Movement demonstrated that they were, perhaps, more successful than they imagined. Other college spaces, like the campus center that recently opened at Smith, are intentional attempts to create public space where little existed before. The build- ing is not a student center, but a campus center; with the exception of the student government, no group owns any space within it. In designing the building, the architectural firm of Weiss/Manfredi envisioned a roofed-over market- place, a village square full of open walkways and gathering spaces, in which the community could see itself as a com- munity, engaged in a wide variety of activities. Activities housed in the building bring people inside — the post office, the campus store, a cafe, open Internet terminals. It also has many small seating areas — areas in which to read, to talk, to share a cup of coffee. In shap- ing such spaces, the building makes extensive use of glass; indeed, many of its meeting rooms are transparent to those passing by. Moreover, a curved walkway extends from the sidewalk in front of the building, through its middle level, out to a large lawn defining one of the campus’s principal quadrangles. From the walkway it is possible to see much of what is going on in the building. As such, the architects suc- cessfully managed to create an urban street in a small town. Christ / Living in Public