Walking Across Campus

Autumn is my favorite time of year for a number of reasons, one of them being its the best time of year to walk across a college campus. Luckily I have a good one near by, Princeton, full of Gothic architecture, and laid out like a medieval village.

On Fridays, when the hockey team is playing a home game, I like to arrive early. I park near the rink and then walk up the hill into town for something to eat, which necessitates cutting across the campus. This is always a pleasure. I love the atmosphere of a campus, and Princeton's is so, well, collegiate, that it can't help making me think back to my college days, and well as kicking in a fantasy that I became a college professor. Unfortunately, I'm about three bricks shy of a load in the intellect department to have attained that goal, and the first time a hot co-ed offered her body in exchange for a better grade I would have been a goner.

The Princeton campus is fun to explore. There's no particular rhyme or reason to how it is laid out, so you can walk across it several dozen times and never take the same route. It's dotted with interesting surprises, like the abstract statue in front of the art museum that, from a certain angle, looks like Richard Nixon. Or you can be walking along and suddenly find yourself in a spectacularly beautiful flower garden. I would think all four years of study would be necessary to figure out the best way from points A to B, and sometimes think of it as a video game, with hidden passageways. A few years I was talking to a student I had gotten to know and she confessed that she sometimes viewed the campus as an immense battleground, and what would be the best strategy? I was amazed at her statement, because I tend to think the same way, and used to imagine the strategy involved in a giant game of capture-the-flag on my old campus. We agreed that seizing the higher ground would be essential, but she didn't know about the network of tunnels underneath the school, so vividly portrayed in the novel The Rule of Four.

Princeton, though largely self-contained, is right across the street from the town itself. My school, Stony Brook, was a large modern university (built in 1959), and you had to have motorized transport to leave it. The only respite was a 7-Eleven across from the train station, which I footed it to many times. I had to take the bus to get to grocery store, and once my shopping bag broke, and I had to leave items on the grass outside the dorm and retrieve them item by item.

A few things I've learned from observing college kids: they seem impervious to cold, and they display great school loyalty. In no matter what the weather, I see kids darting out to do laundry or whatever in their shorts and flip-flops. I never wear flip-flops in the most ideal weather, so it amazes me that their lower extremities are exposed to the elements like this. On top they will invariably be wearing some kind of sweatshirt that has the name of the school on it. I suppose this is a kind of pride and loyalty, but it seems a little odd. When you wear apparel that is emblazoned with words or images, it seems to me that the intention is to tell the outside world something about yourself. Wearing a school sweatshirt while you're at that school seems obvious, like going to a concert wearing the shirt of the band you are seeing. Yeah, we kind of know you're into that band, seeing as you're at the concert.

The Princeton campus is old, but it is continually changing, even in the fourteen years I've been haunting it. There is always construction going on. Several years the tennis courts, right next to the rink and overseen by an incongruous pagoda, were torn down and replaced by a new dormitory, named for the donor, Meg Whitman, who is now trying to be governor of California. This dorm is built in the Gothic tradition of many of the other buildings, but another new dorm, named for its donor, Michael Bloomberg (his daughter went to school there) is more modern in design. I wonder how many more billionaire-politicians will build things on campus. The football stadium, simply called Princeton Stadium, has had its naming rights for sale for years. I've often day-dreamed about having the money to name it, but not for me. I'd name it for an illustrious alumni--no, not Brooke Shields, but Ralph Nader.