Education, like many things in our culture, is prone to cliches. We have our own versions in Charlotte: the ubiquitous “commitment to excellence” that is rarely defined; so-called “neighborhood” schools where neighborhoods are equated with car-dominated suburbs; and “equal opportunity,” a phrase that comes perilously close to the old doctrine of “separate but equal.” These are just three that come most easily to mind.
All of these educational cliches relate to our city’s continuing saga about our public schools. These urgent issues deserve wide coverage, but unfortunately they’ve eclipsed the progress and problems of UNC Charlotte in the public’s mind. And our flagship of higher education has its own set of aphorisms, chief among which is “A City for Learning.”
I spend a large proportion of my working hours on the campus out on Hwy 49, in the midst of what is euphemistically termed “University City.” In the 11 years of my tenure here I’ve come to know the university intimately, and watched it grow in size and stature. I’m proud of my association with the institution, but working out there — or rather, traveling to work out there by car or by bus — demands a certain mindset, an attitude that requires me to ignore the ugliness of the areas surrounding the campus, typical of the tawdriness of our throw-away consumer society.
The campus is like an oasis, or a place where time has slowed down, separating it from the hectic prosperity of the wastelands beyond its borders. Here the buildings, and the landscape surrounding them, are expected to last for several generations, not just a few years. Several of them are not very good buildings, but at least they speak to values that transcend the fast buck.
But this separateness from the encircling dystopia is also the institution’s great weakness. Its detached, suburban location puts the campus in a similar cultural category as a shopping mall. It’s a single-function megastructure, divorced from its surroundings, internalized in its focus, and providing services that most of its customers drive to, do their business, and leave.
The tendency for university administrators to refer to students as “customers” drives many veteran professors (myself included) to distraction, but in this case the cultural comparison is distressingly apt. Here, getting an education is an activity compartmentalized in place and time, divorced from the surrounding community.
Now, not much of this is UNC Charlotte’s direct fault. We inherited a far-flung suburban location that ripped us from the urban heart of the city four decades ago. There were all sorts of reasons given, reasons that sounded convincing in the context of the frenzied suburban migration of city functions to the green fields that typified the 1960s. Folks thought they made sense then, but — with the wisdom of hindsight, and in the context of a major reappraisal of what constitutes the “American City” — these decisions have left the current leadership of the university with challenges worthy of Hercules himself.
UNC Charlotte is a special place, but more so because of the people rather than the place itself. The suburban isolation, and the societal mindset that clings to this community-sapping sprawl, is a major problem without an easy solution. My larger concern is that the way we plan and build can actually diminish the quality of education — by failing to provide the rich community context and culture that is the ideal setting for educational institutions.
This missing element was brought home to me forcibly on two visits recently — to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Our English son lives in Cambridge and works in Boston, and I never tire of visiting that urban and educational mecca. This last visit was memorable in part for the stunning urban development taking place around the MIT campus.
Under the impetus of the rapidly growing biotechnology sector, this part of Cambridge looks like Berlin a decade ago — a forest of cranes, and construction sites everywhere. University buildings are rising cheek-by-jowl with private offices and laboratories. Sites left derelict for years are now being recycled into active, high-grade urban functions. New housing is mixed in with other uses, and a walk of just a few blocks reveals a lively urban
culture in the making — researchers and students blending with folk from other walks of life. Best of all, old buildings are being rehabilitated, radically converted internally to dramatic effect. Here, old and new combine to provide historical continuity, constructing the large-scale community narrative within which smaller, personal histories and memories are fabricated.
“Ah, yes,” you’ll say. “But that’s Boston. That’s different from Charlotte.” So it is. But it’s also better. The city is being built in ways that generate urban vitality, and MIT is an integral component of the mix.
But great universities can also benefit from being embedded in smaller cities, as seen in the small university twin towns of Urbana-Champaign on the Illinois prairie. This is where my wife grew up, went to school and earned her first degree in painting. It’s where my father-in-law worked as a university librarian, and wrote his history-changing epic of the American Indian, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
The scale of the place is much smaller than Cambridge, the pace much slower. But the urban environment of the towns melds seamlessly with the fabric of the great university. Residential streets suddenly become campus avenues, houses and yards giving way to dormitories, laboratories and libraries. The university literally binds the two communities together, the urban blocks and street names continuing through from east to west, north to south.
The gravely serious education buildings are interspersed with coffee shops, bookstores, cafes, restaurants and bars, their brash facades and advertisements providing a contrast with academia in all its forms — the portentous classicism of the older seats of learning, the clunky brutalism of their mid-century modernist counterparts, and the upstart high-tech deco style of recent university architecture. In one huge computer lab sits a descendant of HAL, the real-life precursor of its fictional counterpart in the movie 2001. A block or two away on the same street are apartments, offices and stores.
If students fancy a study break lying on the grass of the great quadrangle, as I observed them on a recent Sunday, they don’t have to hop in their cars and drive. They simply walk a couple blocks, picking up a sandwich and a latte on the way.
Cambridge and Urbana-Champaign are true “cities for learning.” And they achieve this status because their universities are integral components of a larger urban framework, an inclusive network of connected streets, spaces and uses that integrates learning and living in a seamless weave of life and culture. They have advantages that UNC Charlotte can never match.
But our local university tries. It has a new campus plan that puts more emphasis on lining Highways 29 and 49 with new buildings, some of them containing classrooms and private research labs in a new public-private venture. However, the institution inhabits a locality called University City, and it’s hard to imagine anything less like a city than this northern suburb of Charlotte. This nowhere land truly illustrates Gertrude Stein’s famous saying: “When you get there, there’s no there there.”
In this context, the phrase “city for learning” is ironic, tinged with tragedy, and I have to take some of the blame. I was a member of the campus planning “task force” that coined it in an attempt to set a more urban direction for the university, as opposed to becoming an enclave. Crafting walkable, lively urbanity amid a sea of suburban schlock is a tough challenge, but it’s one the institution can rise to.
It’s not impossible to envision Highway 49 lined with three stories of apartments over stores on the private frontage opposite the campus, with wide sidewalks for internet cafes, copy shops, and bookstores. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Highway 49 itself, named at that point University City Boulevard without a trace of irony, could become a more pedestrian friendly street, a true boulevard with slower traffic and safe crossing points for pedestrians and bicyclists. To aid this plan, the university plans new buildings that reach out towards the street to welcome visitors and students.
It’s also not fantasy to imagine Highway 29 similarly treated, with solid, enduring university buildings along its frontage, shaming the tacky strip centers on the opposite side to rebuild in a more urban, adventurous and farsighted manner. We might even imagine a light rail service to Concord and downtown Charlotte swooping along the median, and small neighborhood buses transporting riders to homes, classes, offices and shops.
It’s a Herculean task, but not a Sisyphean one, doomed to eternal failure. In the meantime, however, I foresee several more years of interrupting my teaching and research to get in my truck to leave campus for a cappuccino. As I press the pedal to the metal for the Mad Max ride to Starbucks, I’m truly envious of colleagues for whom the large pleasures of lifelong learning and the small daily delights of good coffee can be enjoyed in the same place. Now that’s a real city.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2001.
