University of Virginia Library

The Early Problems

(1) Birdwood is a rolling stretch of land west of
Charlottesville about 500 acres in size, bought by the
University of Virginia in 1967. Drive out US 250 beyond the
US 29 bypass interchange, and it's the clearing on your left
just after you pass the Bellair subdivision sign and before you
get to the Boar's Head Inn and Edam Forest areas. It is
presently proposed by the University that Birdwood, or a
portion thereof, be used for "residential colleges" (see the
Charlottesville Daily Progress or the Richmond Times-Dispatch
May 27).

(2) Since Birdwood is close but not immediately adjacent
to the main Grounds, the very first thing we need is a
connecting road with a bridge over the bypass. That is what
the University told the governor's budget advisory council in
May. The proposed road will run through Bellair, and it is not
surprising therefore that residents have been firing letters to
the Daily Progress in opposition to the plan. It is not widely
known but nonetheless a fact that money for a bridge to
Birdwood was requested in the previous biennium, at which
time the University had its request denied for this and other
projects. Why weren't the Bellair residents up in arms back at
that time? Well, because the bridge money was buried in the
appropriations request for utilities.

A Road And A Bridge

(3) But that's another story. It merely goes to show that
we've apparently needed that bridge and road for a long time
already.

(4) Why do we need that new route to Birdwood, there
being presently an unpaved access road into the property from
US 250? We need it because the students in the residential
colleges out there will need quick access to Alderman Library,
to the science labs, and to classes on the Grounds. And
because US 250 is a crowded road, especially as it becomes Ivy
Road near the Grounds. And because we don't want students
out there to feel a sense of isolation from the rest of the
University.

(5) These are the reasons being given, and I suspect a few
others could be hazarded. Birdwood will need water, power,
and heat, perhaps most economically provided from sources
that serve the Grounds. It would be esthetically pleasing to
incorporate necessary utilities in the design of a road and
bridge, besides probably saving construction money by doing
it all at once. This is a reason that makes considerable sense;
the others, I think, betray some lapses of logic and failure of
imagination.

The Writer Loses His Cool
Temporarily

(6) That is, if students at Birdwood need Alderman that
often; if they need those labs three or four times a week; if
their newly-built surroundings are that drab and uncongenial;
if their fellow suffering classmates are that dull, shallow, and

uncommunicative, then something is grievously wrong with
the architecture, the curriculum, and the selection process. If
we cannot plan ahead to avoid some of these stunning
grievances, then we may as well build high-rise dormitory
boxes at random spots on the present Grounds and forget
about housing students at Birdwood at all. Why put them
there in the first place, if their immediate need is to get back
here, in such numbers that a bee-line bridge and road is the
only solution? Use the air over University Hall parking areas
and put dorms, classrooms, and snack bars there. Run a bridge
over US 29 to similar facilities in Lambeth Field. And leave
Birdwood for the geese and golfers and ecology freaks—making
sure to lease the highway frontage to Shell, Sunoco, BP, Dairy
Queen, and Stuckey's.

(7) Sarcasm aside, the assumed need for this bridge might
just possibly be a symbol of the kind of thinking I hope we can
avoid from the beginning as we start visualizing an academic
experience at Birdwood in organic relation to its setting. It
seems to me the kind of unexamined assumption that tends
to get made, and once made, is not hauled out for scrutiny
until it's too late. No more than any one else do I want to
spend years of unproductive hassling over this and that detail
of Birdwood. None of us, after all, is going to be entirely
pleased with what we finally propose for Birdwood. Some of
us have irreconcilable differences in esthetic tastes and in
academic philosophy, though I suspect we will discover a great
deal of agreement on the latter as we sit down and exchange
our premises, goals, and ideals.

Realism Is Not The Same
As Fatalism

(8) What I am concerned about is that we examine these
premises and the proposed solutions they lead to, reserving
any binding and constricting recommendations until we are
sure we have brought some imagination to bear and have not
fallen into the habit of saying "no" to possible alternatives
simply because it is a little harder to go to the library, to
consultants, to our own ingenuity, to see if there is a "yes"
lurking anywhere. Underneath my Midwestern cynicism
regarding authorities and decision-makers, there beats the
sanguine heart of Norman Vincent Peale: I believe that
obstacles—budgetary, governmental, environmental,
prejudicial, what have you—should be regarded as challenges to
the imagination, not as occasions for adopting the easy
deterministic stance of "Well, it might be nice, but...." Or, "I
can tell you right now before going any further that it won't
work."

(9) Let me try to indicate what I mean by beginning with
the matter of isolation at Birdwood. I will not be proposing
anything more than a tentative chain of ideas to be considered
and debated; if my questions seem merely rhetorical and my
formulations somewhat dogmatic, I will make the provisional
defense that I have thought about these things being proposed
and continue to think and learn. I learned some things while
planning and reading in my first-year seminar last fall on "The
Idea of a University," and I learned some things in August of
1970 by participating for a week in sessions on "New
Environments for Learning" at the meeting of the Society for
Religion in Higher Education. I learned some things while
attending a two-day workshop of the Southern Regional
Education Laboratory last October in Durham. Like many of
my colleagues, I read and clip newspapers and magazines and
pick the brains of friends who teach elsewhere. None of us is
as ignorant as we sometime feel we must be, or as our students
are sometimes convinced that we are.

(10) That immodest assertion aside, let us begin
investigating this problem of isolation by examining our
present situation to see what it suggests as a line of thought.
Growth figures for the University presently suggest 18,000
total students, with 9,000 in the College, for 1980. Until we
have a report in February from the new Future of the
University committee, let's work from here. We are evidently
going to house and educate a portion of these 9,000 students
at Birdwood, and if we are going to do this, some procedure
must be found for putting a portion of them there and a
portion of them here on the Grounds. Why would it not be the
maximum of logic and the minimum of administrative frazzle
to design some scheme whereby self-selection will for the most
part sort out students who wish to go one place or the other?

Theme of "Difference" Introduced

(11) How might this work? Is this not asking for sheer
chaos? Let's consider a bit further what the implications are. If
a student is going to exercise a preference, then there must be
decisive differences in the two places. Otherwise a flip of the
coin would do, or arbitrary fiat from the Housing Office.
One of these differences seems to be assured: I do not see how
the Commonwealth of Virginia can afford to duplicate or even
approximate Alderman Library, Gilmer Hall, Physics, and
Chemistry at Birdwood. Some rudimentary lab equipment I
can conceive of, and certainly a few books (or else an
electronic information-retrieval system), but that's about all.
Which means then that already the unlucky folk out there are
clearly second-class citizens educationally, aren't they—and
that the difference is already so big as to make free choice a
hypocrisy? Not so. Only if you are determined to operate
with the premise that sophisticated equipment and tens of
thousands of books are sine qua non for a first-class education.
I for one am not.

(12) A preliminary conclusion, then: Students whose
majors or interests demand quantities of equipment and the
proximity of a million books will self-select themselves on the
Grounds or in apartments nearby; they will not come to
Birdwood, and we should not try to plan for them. Birdwood
does not have to be all things to all men.

Addicts Considered

(13) Nor will students opt for Birdwood if they have
already been conditioned to demand a cheeseburger at the
White Spot, a flick twice a week at the University Theatre, and
a read in a skin mag at Mincer's, all at the end of a ten or
twenty-minute walk from their dorm. Nor will students opt
for Birdwood if they see that most of the courses they want or
need, most of the professors they admire and desire, are
teaching only on the Grounds.

(14) The problems seem to be mounting up: If you can't
have library, labs, Charlottesville amenities, and the courses
you want, what is going to induce you to go out to Birdwood?
The Charlottesville housing crisis maybe? But that's a poor
way to populate a beautiful piece of land—by using rejects
from area landlords and unluckies who fail the Housing Office
lottery. So let's forget that. Nothing is going to induce a
student to want to go out to Birdwood unless this is
something-strikingly-different in the way of an education and
a setting will be seductive enough to counteract the
disadvantages cited above and thereby entice out to Birdwood
the two or three thousand undergraduates that we are likely to
deem the desirable figure. Mere difference won't do.

(15) What kinds of difference, then? Something radical,
outlandish, foolhardy, simple-minded? Something impossible
to fund or maintain? Something freewheeling to the point of
abolishing requirements and even a degree? Or (to go to the
other extreme) does this mean really only superficial or
"cosmetic" differences—a bit of tinkering here and there with
the curriculum, perhaps the addition of a few niceties to make
the living situation more comfortable?

Think Big, Think Small

(16) I do not see why difference should mean either of
these things, but neither should we reject these extremes out
of hand. Frank experimentation is not unheard of in
publicly-financed higher education. The College at Old
Westbury in the State University of New York system is one
example, having been funded not only once but twice, after
the first experiment circa 1969 was by common consent a
failure (my source is John Maguire, the new president, from
his report at last year's SRHE meeting—see also the September
1971 Harper's). And we ought also to keep in mind that mere
"cosmetic" changes are sometimes more important than people
think. As a very low-level and disgusting example, consider the
impact on workers that the simple addition of piped-in Muzak
is demonstrated to have, and the remarkable effect that minor
refurbishing of dorms has had at such places as MIT (College
Management magazine, September 1971).

(17) It seems to me sensible that we begin to define our
difference between Birdwood and the Grounds by turning for
a moment to the faculty. For they will need inducement too,
unless I vastly misjudge my colleagues. I am assuming that for
some two to three thousand students in a "residential college"
or "cluster" of colleges there must be at least a couple of
dozen faculty members in residence (For each college of 600
students, the University of California at Santa Cruz plans a
resident provost and 12 resident faculty.) I am not arguing
that the University should provide them free housing or that
residence on a permanent basis should be sought by any
faculty member, but it does seem reasonable that the
University provide self-amortizing housing for at least a core of
faculty, and that conditions be devised that make it attractive
for a variety of faculty—young, older, single, married,
members of various disciplines—to spend terms of one, two,
perhaps in some cases three or four years in residence there,
giving of themselves in a much more intensive and extensive
way than they do in their present situation on the Grounds.

(18) Obviously I tend to oppose the idea of an independent
faculty at Birdwood, with no connection to the departments
on the Grounds, though I know this is the plan at certain other
places, such as the "university college" proposed at
Massachusetts. Partly my objection is merely intuitive, but also
it seems to me that one way quickly to petrify a new
undergraduate college is to appoint a permanent staff, even
one made up of "stars." Moreover, few teachers and their
families can stand the pressure of year after year of intense
community living, and we should not pretend otherwise.

Inducement For Faculty

(19) How, then, can incentive be arranged for members of
our present faculty to spend two or three years at Birdwood?
What will induce a man to pack up his family, sublet his house
in town for a while, and take occupancy of a Birdwood
furnished flat, town house or whatever? If furthermore, we
expect him, once there, to be available to students virtually all
day, day after day, what can we do to compensate him for
giving up his library study, his book-in-progress, some of his
weekends, his evenings in the back yard without a student
within miles? I suggest we begin with independence as at least
some inducement—independence, I might add, accompanied
by a modification of University retention and promotion
policy: adherence to an explicit declaration that the University
shall bother no one for his bibliography during the years that
he is giving of himself in other ways and presumably growing
intellectually while at Birdwood.

(20) Now it seems contradictory to say that a man may be
independent when surrounded by students who want claims
on his time and energy. What I am speaking of is intellectual
independence of a serious and valuable kind—the
independence that will enable a professor to decide for
himself, with full carte blanche, exactly what he will teach,
what courses he will offer, what topics he is willing to pursue
in seminars for the year or two or three he is in residence. To
free him, in effect, from the obligation to teach his
department's required courses, its introductory surveys, and its
needed courses to "round out" the offerings; to relieve him of
College and department committee obligations and paper
work. To let him say, in effect; to students:

Photo By Lovelace Cook