Universities are laboratories for community-building where strangers are quickly transformed into classmates and lifelong friends. No sooner have freshmen unpacked their bags and said farewell to their parents than they begin the transfer to a new alma mater or "nourishing mother." From matriculation to Commencement, the language of "family" is continuously invoked.
Much of the work in this transformation was formerly done by rituals, whether it was freshman beanies and paddling or serenades, hymns and maypoles. Few of these traditions survived the 1960s. However, colleges continue to create Bobcats, Tigers, Gators, Bears and, yes, even Terrapins and Jumbos.
While much of this work is now done by sports programs, especially in Div. I schools, the main site for the creation of this new identity is the campus itself: its buildings, gates, greenswards and landmarks. This is where, if all goes well, a powerful new attachment is formed and four years are magically converted into a lifetime of memories.
For many people in our increasingly mobile society, the university will remain the most stable community they encounter. It is little surprise, therefore, that a number of schools are now offering on-campus internment for deceased alumni. But it's more than stability that draws graduates - dead or alive - back to their alma maters. Campuses provide a utopic experience, which, as the term indicates, will be like "no place" they ever inhabit again.
The great architect Le Corbusier certainly perceived this during his one visit to the United States in the mid-1930s, when he observed that "the American university is a world in itself, a temporary paradise, a gracious stage of life." And seven decades later, Robert Campbell made a similar observation, claiming that "every university campus is a kind of utopian community, an attempt to create what novelist Henry James called 'the Great Good Place,' where one can aspire to the higher life of the mind and the spirit."
Whether they are in an "ivory tower" or simply not part of the "real world," universities share many characteristics with utopian communities, especially those that flourished across the United States throughout the 19th century. Planned environments set apart from the surrounding universe, like the eponymous island for which Sir Thomas More coined the term, these academic utopias are also places of shared ideals and purpose. Their grassy quads and leafy settings, free of cars and commercial signage, are reminiscent of New England town greens of another era.
Just as important is the spirit of egalitarianism; the college campus is a place where social class division is replaced by the barely visible distinction between freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, all of whom appear in a fairly homogenous denim uniform. Even money has been replaced by the endlessly replenished swipe card, good for anything from a pizza to a spin cycle. Another important parallel to the 19th-century utopian experiment is gender equality. In fact, it was the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier who first coined the term "feminism" in 1837, insisting that "women's rights was the general principle of all social progress." Today, sociologists say that the university is the least discriminating environment a woman will ever face.
Fourier, like other utopianists, believed that the domestic arrangement of the nuclear family was a primary obstacle to any form of liberation. The goal of all utopic experiments, therefore, has been to replace the isolated family unit with a new social communitarianism in which people live and work together. It's easy to make the leap from here to the "Academical Village" conceived by Thomas Jefferson. This was the Anglo-American collegiate model where students and faculty would live together, learning as much from their close proximity outside the classroom as inside.
It is this social communitarianism, whether in a dorm, culture house, fraternity or sorority, that is responsible for forming the deepest bonds to place. Only through powerful connections to one another, whether it be family or friends, are lasting connections to place established. And nowhere is this stronger than in the social networks that thrive in the utopic environment of a college campus.
Over the last two years, I have been engaged with a number of students in the exploration of what we have called "the architecture of utopia." The Boston area is an ideal place for such a study, as it offers the opportunity to visit a variety of college campuses - each of which offer a different vision of utopic space. In every case, the history, mission, location and student body combine with other factors to create a unique campus environment. Whether it is an elite university like Harvard, a women's college like Wellesley, a cutting-edge scientific institution like MIT, a two-year community college with a large minority student body like Bunker Hill Community College or an urban school with an emerging downtown campus like Emerson, there is a strong connection between the built environment and the particular learning community it creates.
But I wanted to go beyond the mere semiotics of these visual constructions and move the discussion of sense of place from a noun to a verb. Or, to paraphrase authors Steven Feld and Keith Basso, I wanted to discover how places are sensed and the way senses make places. We know what a campus utopia looked like - but what did it sound like? It was from questions like these that "Harmony in the Age of Noise," the artistic structure on the Tisch Library roof, was born.
The first step was to invite composer and sound artist Bruce Odland to Tufts. Despite his many successful site-specific installations around the world, he had never worked on a college campus. He was intrigued with the project and, in particular, with the disjunction between the visual and aural. While campuses might look utopic, might they not be sonically dystopic? Was the same concern for visual detail also given to that of the aural, whether it be cooling systems, humming lights, leaf blowers or the pulsating vending machines that greet visitors at the entrance to many buildings? Was there not a politics of the senses in which the visual dominated every other?
To answer these and other questions, Odland devised a brilliant plan to map Tufts' sonic environment and to create an interactive sound dial through which people would be able to access the results. This one-of-a-kind sound dial now sits at the center of the parabolic gazebo located on the roof of Tisch Library. As people approach the dial, they hear a rumbling, sonorous hum. This is the live feed from the tuning tube placed at the intersection of Boston and College Avenues, which is harmonizing the sounds of Tufts' "main drag" in the key of E. But touch the dial, and other sounds will cascade down from the parabolic dome above.
As one rotates the dial, the many sound maps created by Tufts students are heard - the stairwell in a dorm, a practice room in the music building, swimmers in Cousens Gym, a snatch of conversation as students pass through the entryway of Tisch Library, the drip of a leaky faucet, and many, many other sounds all captured by students in their psycho-geographic explorations of Tufts' sonic universe this spring.
While the sounds heard in "Harmony in the Age of Noise" might challenge our notions of the college campus as a utopic space, the process by which it was created and the way in which it is accessed do not. In fact, they reproduce it. The result of this huge, interdisciplinary campus effort is the construction of the parabola and sound dial which brought together many parts of the Tufts community for the first time. Engineers and carpenters from facilities worked alongside students, faculty members, gallery workers and computer specialists. They were also joined by artists and composers from New York, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere. And as the project progressed, many people from Somerville and Medford also came to volunteer in this labor-intensive process.
Odland referred to it as a "sonic barn raising," and like those wonderful events where neighbors all joined together for a single, common purpose, the completion of "Harmony in the Age of Noise" also seemed to transcend hierarchy and rank. We had come together to explore the nature of utopic communities, and for a brief moment, we were able to create one.
For more on "Harmony in the Age of Noise" or to hear a live stream from the sound dial, visit the project's Web site at: http://www.age-of-noise.net.
David Guss is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology.
