University of Virginia Library

Television, Trees,
And Other Things

(74)1. Would the sense of community be enhanced by
taking for granted the need for a closed-circuit TV system, a
receiver being located in each residence room? (Videotapes,
for example, are easy to make and fun to learn from; it might
be exciting, moreover, if at various time during the year all the
members of Birdwood agreed in advance to watch, say, an
installment of "Civilisation" and then spend the entire next
day, an all classes, using the program as a discussion focus.)

(75)2. Should we safeguard the old barns on the Birdwood
tract as possibly usable and interesting buildings to renovate
and incorporate into an educational plant? (Not the concrete

block barns, but the wooden ones; Santa Cruz has done this, as
has Goddard.)

(76)3. Could we plan mostly gravel roads instead of asphalt
for the new campus, or would noise, dust, and heavy traffic
(deliveries, etc.) make this impractical? (This is one of those
"cosmetic" details that might on paper sound like phony
ruralism but which in practice might have more agreeable and
positive effects than one would expect.)

(77)4. Should some reforestation of Birdwood be started
soon (it is now largely pasture and field), so as to advance the
day when parts of the unused sections of the tract will be a
forest park in the middle of an urbanized central Albemarle
country? (The density of the adjacent Bellair and Edam
Forest residential areas is certainly minimal, to be sure, but at
the same time it does not seem likely that in this fast-growing
area much public recreation space is going to be set
aside, much less a forested tract.)