Ghost Campus by Bethany Geiger
In summer a campus reboots; students are only an afterthought.
At its peak population--about 400 students and 50 full-time professors--Bard College at Simon's Rock resembles a small ant colony. Everybody's busy. Everybody's going somewhere. Midsemester, when everybody's here, you walk down the street and know almost every face and every name. It's kind of nice. You sometimes feel like you're in a 1950s' suburb. "Hey, Herb, how's the wife and kids?" "Not bad, not bad." "Study group at 6:30, right?" "Sure, sure, I'll bring the hummus and chips!"
In midsummer, Simon's Rock becomes a ghost town. But at least it's full of good ghosts.
Places on the campus that are normally crowded--the loud section of the library, the booths by the snack bar--seem naked without people chatting or studying or eating Goldfish. You sit down and are immediately haunted by a hundred different fond memories. It's not quite an abandoned city, much too alive to be like Pompeii. There are still people around--research assistants, professors, staff members. But for these short months, it doesn't feel like a palace of higher education.
So what is it now, if not a college?
Obviously I am witnessing the inevitable hibernation between semesters. Being a student, I've never experienced it before. It's the REM cycle of the school year. The brain of the college is still working, of course, all of the major organs still pumping and regulating, but our eyes are turned inward. Time to reboot the system. Clean the dorms. Mow the grass. Give the classrooms a break from all the pulsing brains and fiery arguments that they usually house.
Most shocking of all is the absence of students.
If we students are missing, the very fabric of the place would fall apart, wouldn't it? The poor campus wouldn't last much longer than a summer without us breathing life into it.
At least, as a student, that's what I expect.
A friend, also from Simon's Rock, came to visit me recently. As she drove her car through the roundabout in the middle of the campus, she let out an excited yell.
"Aaaah! I'm back on campus!" she shouted. "It's like nothing's changed."
We stared at the empty parking lot near the Student Union, which, during the school year, is always filled with cars and wandering students, even in the wee hours of the morning.
"Except there are no people," she corrects. "And … yeah, well, I guess everything's different."
It's the same old place, but everything is more stark. It's just you and the campus. All the same buildings are open during the same workweek hours. The Kellogg Music Center still stands, should one feel tempted to venture inside and play piano for an empty concert hall. The athletic center is full of a lot of the same people pumping iron and walking the track. Security still hangs out on the second floor of the Student Union, even though there are no pesky students around asking for rides to Upper Campus.
But it's not so much what stays the same. It's the feeling you get from the campus in summer. That's what is different.
I remember walking through the hallways of my high school after hours. A club would run late, or I would help out with a teacher event, or I'd stray from the cafeteria during a semiformal dance.
That's when you can really see the bones of a school. The halls and lockers ache with quiet. The classrooms, empty and unlit, became a source of adrenaline. I'd sneak in and sit at a desk, like I was breaking into a museum, while also knowing that I had every right to be there. Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of the janitor emptying a trash can, or two teachers sharing gossip that a kid probably shouldn't be hearing.
A campus in the summer is not so different. Only now, I am part of those bones, part of the sleeping body.
God forbid, could a college campus conceivably function without us students, the whole purpose of its existence? Yes, my friends, it is true. The place runs just fine without us.
In the summer, you can see the people that this place really depends on. They're the ones who report for work every morning, all year long. Meriweather still plans meals for summer programs at the dining hall. Bill still runs the pool for local families. Coleen still sits at the desk in Blodgett, answering everybody's calls and coordinating tours for prospective students. Life is very much the same as it was before.
If college is a year-round ecosystem, the students are only perennial flowers. Everything else is grass and old trees, things that are strong and last a long time. In the fall, there will be a few graduated seniors to miss, some freshmen to forget the names of, but people will adjust and everything will go back to how things were. We students sort of pass over what happens to a campus during the summer months, as if nothing happens if we aren't there to witness it.
I chat about it with Joel, an admissions counselor. He worked over the summer at his own alma mater and knows the feeling. "It gives you a sense of entitlement, of intimacy with the school," he says. "Like, 'I stayed here for a whole summer. This place is mine.'"
I do know that feeling. And, at the same time, I don't. If anything, staying here over the summer is making me realize how much this place doesn't belong to anybody. It is, simply, a place.
But we students do give it balance. Our relationship with a campus is a give and take. It gives us somewhere to live and feed our brains. In return, we give it some spark, that spice of life. Something to remember us by in the dull summer months. The place doesn't really need us … but it sure does miss us when we're gone.
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Bethany Geiger is beginning her junior year at Bard College at Simon's Rock this fall. This summer she is working there as a video publicist and social-media coordinator.
Works Cited
Geiger, Bethany. "Ghost Campus."Chronicle Of Higher Education 58.44 (2012): 16. Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 May 2013.
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