More Again on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog almost certainly know, I’ve been working on a chapter for a volume on campus crises. My chapter is titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis,” and it is focusing on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. Along side that class, I ran a one-credit, pop-up class on two buildings slated for destruction on campus. Many of the same students took this one-credit class as took the three-credit course on the budget. 

I’ve written about the one-credit class in a few other places recently, but I’ve only started to understand the class recently, and my little section in the chapter is my best effort so far. 

As I said yesterday, you can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The Wesley College Documentation Project

The other measure of the impact of the class on both its students and myself as an instructor came when we received word that the university administration had decided to demolish two of our campus’s historic buildings. These buildings were in poor repair, had suffered from years of deferred maintenance, and were empty at the start of the semester. One building had housed the university honors program and the other the large and thriving psychology program and as a result both buildings were broadly familiar to students in the budget class. The buildings originally housed a separate, but affiliated institution called Wesley College, which the University of North Dakota purchased in the early 1960s. Since being acquired by UND, these buildings served a range of functions from dormitories to laboratory spaces, classrooms, and faculty and staff offices. When news of the buildings’ destruction reached us, I proposed a one-credit “pop-up” class focusing on these two buildings and built around what I have called elsewhere “mildly anarchist” principles. While I have discussed this class in greater detail elsewhere (Caraher 2024; Caraher, Wittgraf, and Atchley 2021), this one-credit course was so closely bound to the budget class that it deserves some attention here. Nearly all the students in the budget class enrolled in it alongside some curious history students. The class met in an abandoned classroom in one of the buildings.

The planned demolition of these buildings added to the sense of crisis on campus. Not only was the rationale for the demolition of these buildings unclear to many students and faculty—even as students in the class came to understand the financialized logic of deferred maintenance on campus—but the actual state of the buildings and the former uses of the spaces inside their walls remained unevenly known. We were fortunate to find willing and eager collaborators in our campus’s facilities department who gave us virtually unlimited access to the buildings which had their power and water shut off and were in a state of pre-destruction abandonment. The facilities staff was also only too eager to talk to us about how the buildings worked and open traditionally off limits door to storage closets, offices, and pipe filled rooms. This meant that students (and, indeed, myself!) were able to roam the buildings freely.

The class itself centered on this unprecedented access to the space. Since the university had contracted with an architectural historian to prepare formal documentation of the buildings in keeping with standards established by the Historic American Building Survey, I encouraged the students to consider other ways to document and think about these abandoned and soon-to-be-demolished buildings. The students, with little experience in architectural history or archaeological methods, took to documenting rooms and offices with attention to signs of contemporary use and past reuse. Armed with notebooks, their phone cameras, and their own curiosity they explored formerly off limits lab spaces, faculty offices, and facilities areas. I moved from room to room with the students discussing what they were seeing, finding, and figuring out, and we also discussed ways to take our work further. One student, for example, took the initiative to photograph the buildings using film (and often expired film) as part of a personal photography project designed to capture the building’s abandonment as a manifestation of the campus’s budget. Other students became interested in archival and historical records for the previous functions these buildings served when they were the site of Wesley College. Finally, some students became especially eager to disclose the traces of the buildings’ former use hidden by drop ceilings, institutional carpeting, and drywall. In some cases, they pulled down drop ceilings to expose wall scars or, in one case, the remanent of a coffered ceiling that would have added to an elegant touch what would have been a formal sitting room when one of the buildings served as a dorm. With the help of facilities they also stripped back the commercial grade carpeting to reveal the remains of a terrazzo floor with inset mosaics in the same room. In a room above this well-appointed sitting room, the students discovered the names of four students etched in the glass of what was originally a dormitory window in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914. While three of these former students went on to long and seemingly prosperous lives, one died in the Great War. While these students If the work in the budget class focused on producing a guide for students to understanding more clearly the inner workings of the increasingly professionalized university administration, the efforts in the two former Wesley College buildings were open-ended and experiential.

The students themselves gravitated to questions that involved the opening of spaces traditionally off limits to them. They spent time in abandoned faculty offices, laboratory spaces, and facilities areas. They were especially fascinated with caches of obsolete technology and the tangled masses of cables and interconnects that characterize forms of academic “boomsurfing” where faculty save technology acquired on research grants as a way to stretch the value of episodic resource booms (Purser 2017). They also sought to actively strip away contemporary accretions that obscure the older history of the building as if to reveal hidden processes. This extended from the buildings themselves to the archives where they dug through both the records of Wesley College and the later history of the programs and departments that these buildings housed. This work paralleled their interrogation of both the history of higher education and the contemporary financial mechanisms that support the allocations of funds across the university. 

If the results of the budget class were a small book, the results of what we called the “Wesley College Documentation Project” were more diverse. The photographs taken by Wyatt Atchley were published as part of a discussion of austerity in a volume of North Dakota Quarterly, the century old little magazine that found itself particularly embattled by the same campus-wide budget cuts (Caraher 2018). The students also helped coordinate a ceremony designed to recognize that one of the two buildings was a memorial to Harold H. Sayre who died in the Great War. His father who funded the construction of the building in 1908 requested the administration at Wesley College to honor his late son on their campus. They discovered this connection through archival research which also produced a poem written by Sayre’s pilot who had survived the crash in France that took Sayre’s life. We included this in the program of an event attended by the commander of the local Air Force base, the university president and other officials, and many interested members of the community. The presence of a bagpiper made the event even more poignant. Finally, Michael Wittgraf, a professor in the music department, recorded a piece of music that drew upon the acoustics of the buildings as one of the rooms was originally built as a recital hall. A video accompanying this piece spliced photos and videos of the building’s with the music to convey the sense of anxiety pervasive on campus. 

The connection between the class’s exploration of the Wesley College buildings, the various efforts to make the history of these buildings public, and the budgetary crisis on campus was not direct. Without a doubt, the spirit of the budget class, particularly its interest in revealing the administrative working obscured by decades of professionalization, paralleled student excitement to enter spaces typically closed off to students and to remove accretions designed to make the spaces of these buildings more useful on the contemporary campus. The sense of melancholy surrounding the demolition of a building intended to memorialize a fallen soldier and son seemed to reinforce the sense of sadness experienced by the students as they encountered the palpable tension between the intensely contemporary budget crisis and the longer history of the institution. The Wesley College buildings, despite decades of adaptation and neglected, became physical manifestations of their less tangible sense of loss and change on campus.