University as Non-Place

In episode #78 of Zero Squared, host Douglas Lain talks to Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich.  The pair have compiled and edited, Airplane Reading, a range of essays about air travel.  One of the great things about this collection is that just about everyone has had an experience, or has a story to tell, about flying or being in an airport. Their conversation, particularly when they touch on the ideology of non-places, reminded me of an essay I wrote, which argues that like airports and zoos, U.S. universities have become non-places: transient, asocial, securitized zones where one must complete paperwork about one's identity to keep moving, to reach one's desired destination. 

            "IN THE SUMMER of 2013, I worked as a hospitality agent at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.  I was hired by a private contractor to provide hospitality support to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in the immigration area of the international corridor.  The “hospitality services” I performed as part of a four person crew with one managing “Pathfinder” consisted mostly of directing incoming passengers into the appropriate immigration queues based on their nationality or Green Card status, helping incoming passengers find and fill out appropriate paperwork about their identity, and occasionally serving as a French interpreter at the request of CBP agents at their booths.  As hospitality agents, our requests to passengers, which we made as politely as possible – “please use this form,” “please wait here until more room in the line becomes available,” “no cell phone use in this area, please” – were systemically backed up by threat of physical force from the CBP agents, who, as David Graeber observes regarding police officers, are “essentially bureaucrats with weapons” (119). 

The passengers with whom I dealt seemed acutely aware of the underlying, often racialized violence which structures and maintains securitized border apparatuses the world over: white Americans did the vast majority of the complaining (though would usually balk when I suggested I could find a CBP agent to hear their grievance), white Europeans did not complain as much but did often ask to be moved ahead in the line so that they would not miss their next connecting flight, and people of color from the West and travelers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East almost never said anything.

            My summer job, according to Marc Augé, can be said to have taken place in a “non-place.”  Augé theorizes in 1995 that “the traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-space” (86); identity, history, access/movement, and relations with others and the material environment are reconfigured and re-ordered under threat of state violence in these zones of transience.  Sarah Sharma builds upon Augé’s work in her essay “Baring Life and Lifestyle in the Non-Place,” explaining that:

            As nodal points in the circulation of goods, people, capital, and information, [non-places] include airports, theme parks, highway stops, chain hotels, entertainment mega-mall complexes and refugee camps.  Non-places have functioned as a theoretical footnote to signal the loss of politics, the rise of the transaction over interaction, and the sad life of the lost traveler/citizen in the tragedy of contemporary civic life (129).

Sharma furthermore discusses “asocial facelessness” (134) as a defining aesthetic of workers in non-places, and she points out the codependent relationship of non-places to “spectacular media saturated spaces of capital” (131).  The underlying structural violence of non-places, according to Sharma, is often allayed “by the promise of the spectacle’s wares” (131). 

In the U.S., policy makers and academic administrators are reshaping and reimagining institutions of higher education so that, like airports, amusement parks, shopping malls, and refugee camps, colleges and universities on the whole now fall into the category of non-places.  This claim rests on several theoretical commonalities between the functioning of contemporary institutions of higher education and the features of non-places theorized by Augé, Sharma, Andrew Wood, and others.  The first, most obvious feature of modern institutions of higher education that corresponds to theories of non-place is transience.  Students are of course transient by their nature; however, they are becoming more so.  Taking into account students at all institutions of higher education in the U.S., the dropout rate is now more than half (Porter).  Those on the right may try to frame the high dropout rate as a crisis of personal choice on the part of the student, though it is important to bear in mind that students often leave because of financial hardship due to the skyrocketing costs of higher education.  Also, many unprepared students enroll because they (reasonably) believe a college education is their only ticket out of poverty (Weissman), though obviously not a sure one.  The (perhaps correlated) well-documented proliferation of adjuncts and graduate student instructors also causes faculty members to become more transient: 78.3% of faculty members were on the tenure track in 1969, a percentage down to 33.5% in 2009 (Kezar and Maxey).  With this development, in addition to the proportion of students taking online courses, now at an all-time high (Allen and Seaman 4), university labor as well continues to trend towards the “asocial facelessness” of non-place workers about which Sharma writes.    

            One central caveat to this point though is that with the financial strain of undergraduate degrees necessitating longer completion times for some, graduate school becoming more common, career changes becoming more frequent due to what Alan Greenspan praised years ago as “flexible labor” (Greenspan), and part-time faculty becoming more desperate (Patton), the transience associated with higher education is becoming more permanent, so to speak. 

What kind of politics emerge from such a non-place?  Wood’s “argues that the airport terminal is indicative of a new kind of emerging polis – one that increasingly is the place that defines ‘us’” (Sharma 132).  In essence, spaces of higher education are seamlessly joining other non-spaces as sites of permanent movement and dislocation – “grounds unfit for public life where ‘formerly distinct geographies no longer occupy a site from which rhetorical contests of values may be mounted, or even imagined’” (Wood qtd in Sharma 132).  Perhaps also, with the proliferation of mega mall food court-style student unions, and the fragile and sterile mirrored window architecture of the corporate office park, which is replacing the sturdy, permanent-feeling aesthetic of Brutalism, I could add that in campus building design there has been a definite material trend towards the non-place by disintegrating local referents which orient and situate the traveler.

Older, sturdy, indelible-seeming brutalist campus building at the University of Louisville. 

Newer, fragile, transient-seeming corporate office park-style campus building at Eastern Michigan University. 

           And as with “gated communities, theme parks, and refugee camps [which] operate within a similarly coded logic of exclusion” (Sharma 136), higher education is becoming increasingly cordoned off from that which is outside, reinforcing its boundaries always with structural violence.  Graeber points out that we are not used to thinking of boundaries in everyday institutions like colleges and universities as violent, except on an abstract level, but discounting the importance of this underlying violence, he writes, “is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life, without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men [or women] would indeed be summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required” (112). 

In addition to these material boundaries reinforced by physical violence, the terms on which the university is also a place of inclusion and exclusion, like so much of our world, are becoming increasingly informationalized.  Jill Lepore suspects that the way academics write is a means of exclusion, saying that the current arrangements in university publishing have led to “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose” (Lepore).  And though it is important to note the positive steps that have occurred in the domain of information access in higher education, many of them coming out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), we should also not forget that “critics, both on [MIT’s] campus and around the world, have accused MIT of abandoning its values celebrating inventive risk-taking by helping to doom a young man [Aaron Schwartz] whose project — likely an act of civil disobedience to make information freely available — didn’t in the end cause serious harm” (Bombardieri).  Thus there are multiple dimensions to the “secluded and exclusive infrastructure” (Sharma 132), and its reinforcing violence, which define colleges, universities, and non-places in general.

            With these salient non-place features of higher education, I return to thinking about my non-place summer job at the Sea-Tac airport.  Essentially, my role was that of a type of guide, helping to steer linguistically and culturally diverse groups of people through a systematic process in a securitized space, the results of which, I hoped, would lead to recognition from the authorities (unless of course the traveler was planning to set off a bomb or was dealing in human trafficking), granting the traveler necessary permission to proceed to wherever it is they hoped to go next. 

Compare that with my role as a college instructor.  My first four instructional and mentorship roles in higher education have been likewise temporary positions helping people also seeking a type of institutional authorization for transit to their desired destination.  As an instructor, just like a hospitality worker helping passengers “invent Passport Control,” to borrow Peter Bartholomae’s phrase, I am expected to help guide – in the form of helping students determine which scholarly or professional path they should take, in addition to my primary task of helping them learn how to fill out (academic) paperwork about their identity (as mandated by the department head & administrators) so that they will one day receive a diploma, analogous to the CBP agent’s stamp of approval on their passport and customs form.  My friendly suggestions in the classroom – “please use this format,” “please read this essay,” “no cell phone use in this area, please” – are likewise backed up by threat of violence, either actual violence from bureaucrats with weapons, or in the form of a failing grade, which can be just as damaging to a student’s future. 

A further crucial common feature of non-places I should add is that the teacher, hospitality worker, or other laborer, transient both to clientele and to management (flexible labor), who wishes to deviate from the prescribed bureaucratic procedures is herself subject to those same elements of violence which buttress the whole system.  Characteristic, then, of labor and passage through the non-place is a lack of agency.  The laborer is in the predicament of either satisfying the requirements that might or might not help the transient subject before her pass to the next level, thus perpetuating the undemocratic system of structural violence, or she, the laborer, can deviate from the requirements and risk violent regulation herself, firing, and possibly some form of violent expulsion of the transient subject before her. 

Therefore, in airports and universities, non-places which fetishize identity, whether a worker or a client, one’s identity is always absorbed by an overarching instrumental identity - that of the subject who must keep moving or keep shopping."

Works Cited:

Allen, I. Elaine, and Jeff Seaman. "Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States." Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC. (2013): n. pag. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. .

Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Print.

Bombardieri, Marcella. "Aaron Swartz and MIT: The Inside Story." BostonGlobe.com. Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC, 30 Mar. 2014. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Graeber, David. "Dead Zones of the Imagination." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2.2 (2012): 105-28. Print.

Greenspan, Alan. "Economic Flexibility." Federal Reserve Board. Federal Reserve Board, 27 Sept. 2005. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Kezar, Adrianna, and Daniel Maxey. "The Changing Academic Workforce." Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. AGB, May 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Kristof, Nicholas. "Professors, We Need You!" The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2014. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Lepore, Jill. "The New Economy of Letters." The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Lowder, J. Bryan. "Were Brutalist Buildings on College Campuses Really Designed to Thwart Student Riots?" Slate Magazine. The Slate Group LLC., 18 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Marche, Stephen. "The War Against Youth." Esquire.com. Hearst Communications, Inc., 26 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

"Non-Place Naratives." YouTube. YouTube, 27 Feb. 2008. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Patton, Stacey. "From Graduate School to Welfare." The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 May 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Porter, Eduardo. "Dropping Out of College, and Paying the Price." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 June 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Sharma, Sarah. "Baring Life And Lifestyle In The Non-Place." Cultural Studies 23.1 (2009): 129-48. Print.

Weissmann, Jordan. "Why Do So Many Americans Drop Out of College?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 29 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.