Making the Familiar Campus Strange: Fresh Eyes

Some good summertime musing-reading:

The fact of the matter is that we often don’t know our own universities as well as we should. We busy ourselves with the customary multitude of tasks, or we consciously choose not to commit to a place because we’re convinced that the stay will be temporary, or we consider ourselves more “cosmopolitan” (citizens of the world) than “local” (stewards of region), as the popular distinction goes. Some of us have drawn the old invidious comparisons to other places and found our home institutions lacking in certain respects, and instead of appreciating them on their own terms, we decide that their shortcomings give us permission to check out. We travel the same well-worn path from the car to the office, literally and figuratively, so that we miss a good deal of the rest of the campus. These are among the same explanations we all use, assuming we even give much thought to it. More likely, we treat the campus as a vast backdrop that we rarely even regard as we play out our individual parts. At some point, it’s worth asking what we might be missing when we do this.