After returning to campus from spending a month floating between locations — my parents’ house, hotel beds, the living rooms of various relatives and my friends’ couches for assorted amounts of time — I keep noticing spaces. From sleeping on my slightly crooked mattress to sitting in familiar classrooms and treading around campus with my friends, the Wooster experience is spacial.
Being a 20-year-old college student is a transient existence — we live at college part of the year and then go elsewhere, trailing off both to familiar homes and new places. The cinderblock dorm I share with my roommate that houses my books, a dozen photographs taped to the wall and a tea kettle will be vacated at the end of the semester and I will live somewhere else. Spaces are important. Despite the temporary nature of a dorm room, it is important because it feels like home — it feels like a safe space, a controlled space. I occasionally do homework in my room, but it is also a place for sleeping, reflecting and reading. My dorm room has no ex-partners who spontaneously appear or ever-present dramatic, if well-meaning, family members. Yet, this dorm room fails to prioritize natural light, facilitate social interaction or even provide solitude. This white cinderblock haven is the only space on campus I have some control over — and even then, it belongs to the institution. An institution that is designed for certain bodies and identities and not others. The spaces of this institution communicate ideals about who and what happens here.
Over break, while sitting on various couches across the country and tromping in the woods, I felt the power of spaces not surveilled by this institution. While institutions (colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, sexism) are everywhere, many things about living and working in a residential college magnify those presences. Outside, I found spaces where the non-academic parts of me could exist, spaces for conversation. Spaces for friendship, learning, being imperfect and flawed, without rushing into the next academic task. Spaces that embraced queerness, spaces working to be radically inclusive and anti-colonialist, spaces for creativity.
I love my academic classes and I love learning at school. On campus, I wrap myself in academic life because the institution preaches commodified productivity, and I feel both a responsibility and enthusiasm to learn here. But, we learn in so many places beyond our classrooms and textbooks.
At school I, like many other students, neglect creative and relational parts of myself under academic stress. When we live in an institution, on a campus dedicated to notions of “higher learning,” it seems all spaces are designed to facilitate academic productivity. This encourages us to suspend our creative and relational selves. Existing off campus reminded me of the importance of designated non-academic spaces. I wonder now if it is possible to have those on campus, in spite of the institution. We need spaces where academic productivity can be quieted, whether they be spiritual, service based, meditative, social or creative. If we are academic machines all the time, we do a great disservice to ourselves and to others. Encouraging and providing non-academic spaces and times for students to explore things beyond academic elitism and the language of neoliberal productivity — to exist relationally and creatively and not just at parties or on weekends — is just as important as career planning and networking because it teaches us how to think for ourselves — learning to dig into the journey, not just the result.
Hannah Lane-Davies, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at HaLane-Davies21@wooster.edu.