Wesley College

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.

The Music of Merrifield Hall

I was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation.

We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall prior to it undergoing a massive renovation. To mark this transformation of a key building on campus, we published a book edited  by Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar called Campus Building which you can download here.

Mike added video effects to the audio recordings which capture in his inimitable way the acoustic character of the building and use it as a foundation for a deeper exploration of campus change.

These videos are in some way a sequel to Mike’s earlier work “Hearing Corwin Hall,” which we published with some exegesis at Epoiesen in 2021. They represent and manifest the complex changing taking place on campus and the tensions between looking forward toward the future and recognizing the importance of continuity, history, and tradition in the past. They also communicate the anxieties inherent in these transitions.

Being Mindful of Merrifield Hall

When I arrived at UND in 2004, the campus was old. More significant, the community knew its antiquity. (With apologies to A. T. Olmstead). The centerpiece to the old campus was Merrifield Hall. Its wide, double loaded corridors, lined with coat hooks, and paved with terrazzo floors reminded me of a high school. The classrooms featured chalk boards, improvised AV systems barely capable of powerpoint, tall windows clipped by dropped ceilings, and the echoes of generations of students, faculty, and staff reverberating off the hard floors and walls. Merrifield’s auditorium style room had carpeted walls. 

Exteriorcopyright web

At the end of last academic year, Merrifield Hall started to undergo a major update. This involves not only adapting its interior spaces to the needs of contemporary campus life, but also modifying its venerable facade and breaking up the “Gothic wall” that Merrifield has provided along the west side of UND’s central quad. We can quibble about aesthetics, but I’ve made known my feelings about the alienating impact of relentless Gothic facades. Even as Merrifield Hall has become an icon on our campus, it looked and functioned like any number of early-20th century, small town secondary schools in the region. It was a quintessential example of a modern, double-loaded corridor, wrapped in a mystical, romantic Gothic shell and carried the baggage of its design and its symbolism.

More importantly than this, I wanted to propose a few talking points that might help people engage with the changes to Merrifield in productive and interesting ways. Again, these have less to do with aesthetics and more to do our general attitudes to change on campus.   

1. Good buildings are susceptible to adaptation. We have seen quite a few historic buildings on our campus torn down recently (and more are on the chopping block). Many of these buildings, including my beloved Wesley College buildings, succumbed to obsolesce, budgetary constraints, and changing construction and design priorities. Merrifield Hall can be adapted because its architecture (and presumably its design brief) took pains to ensure that it could be modified to the future needs of campus. Of course, it’s difficult to imagine the architect envisioned the kind or extent of the modifications currently underway, but I like to imagine that those responsible for building Merrifield may have also been surprised that the building had not been updated sooner! Good buildings adapt. 

2. Campuses are always being renewed, updated, and transformed. One of the reasons that recent changes to UND’s campus has brought pain to some members of the campus community is because UND’s campus had not been updated for such a long time. As a result some people came to see UND’s campus as an unchanging space which served as an icon for certain fundamental values and the backdrop for an ever present nostalgia.

It goes without saying that university and college campuses often leverage nostalgia to create a sense of community (especially between current students and alumni), a sense of history, and a sense of seriousness. On the other hand, campuses are beacons of progress. We expect them to embody not only cutting edge research, but also the changing social expectations of our society. Campuses are sandboxes, utopian communities, and places where very little is (or should be) sacred.

Changing an iconic campus building should cause some discomfort, but this kind of discomfort is part of what a campus should provide for both students and faculty. If a place has become sacred to your experiences, then it is possible that you’re missing the point of the university as a progressive force in the contemporary world.  

3. Changing the Narrative I. Some of the complains, of course, come from folks who have become convinced that the changes to UND’s campus reflect the long-term neglect of historic buildings on campus. This seems to some folks to be emblematic of the inability of public institutions to be good custodians of public assets and funds. Of course, this rhetoric is favored by the right as a way to carve away resources from what they see as inherently wasteful public institutions and to funnel these resources to the private sector. 

It is always disappointing to hear this line of reasoning, especially when it’s used to accuse the campus administration of being profligate with public funds in the present or irresponsible in the past. Major construction on UND’s campus invariably prompts public outcry from both the right and the left. The former decrying any public funds spent on public institutions and the latter weaponizing the rhetoric of the right to complain about campus priorities. 

Let’s not do this.

4. Changing the Narrative II: Instead, I’d love to see greater appreciation for the new buildings on campus, the new spaces, and the new campus plan. It’s fine if we don’t love it for aesthetic reasons or even on practical grounds, but I’m pretty comfortable calling bullshit on anyone who sees our campus today as worse than our campus of a decade ago. Whether we liked our campus leaders, approved of their leadership, or even respected their priorities, the campus is better now. 

More to the point, when I walk across campus, through buildings, work in my office, and teach in classrooms, UND no longer feels like a campus that burdened by its own antiquity. It pains me when I hear colleagues complain about changes to campus in part because it so often leans on arguments that our administration (and the structures that support it) is incapable of making good, thoughtful decisions. This, in turn, contributes to a larger view that public institutions — from the post-office to public universities — are inherently broken. I get, of course, that change can be inconvenient, messy, and unpredictable. Construction schedules are dependent on the weather, new buildings are compromises, and “mistakes are made,” but it’s hard for me to stomach the idea that our campus is worse now than two decades ago (or even five years ago). 

Merrifield Hall, in particular, was antiquated, inadequate, and run-down. Its “small town high school charm” had given way to a palpable ambivalence that seemed intent on making the building (and anyone who spent time in it) irrelevant. This is not a desirable outcome. 

5. Joseph Bell DeRemer and the Klan. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to recognize that UND continues to struggle with issues of race on campus. In fact, the architect of Merrifield Hall, Joseph Bell DeRemer, is part of that problematic legacy. He was a member of the Klan and I suspect that his Klan connections contributed to his commission on the UND campus in the 1920s. I’ve written about this here. 

While looking from traces of Klan ideology in the architecture of Merrifield Hall might be a bit far-fetched (although the connection between UND buildings and resistance to the Klan has been argued), the tensions encouraged the formation of emergence of the Klan in North Dakota left traces on our campus and our state. Modifying Merrifield Hall will do little to nothing to change the past, but lightening Joseph Bell DeRemer’s influence over campus space might just be a kind of institutional “anti-racism.” 

As I’ve noted throughout this post, campuses always have to compromise between nostalgia and progress, putting a bit more progress into the architecture of Merrifield Hall might just soften the nostalgia for a time (and an individual) that brought very little good to our community. 

Three Things Thursday: Odd and Ends Galore

There comes a time in the semester, especially the spring semester, where I find myself just treading water and trying to keep my head above the waves. This is usually the result of grading, various projects coming in for landings, reading for class, manuscript reviews, and the typical day-to-day work of being alive. It’s during these times, that I turn to my stack of articles, edited volumes, and unfinished side projects and start to think about how I can spend a few minutes here and there making progress without getting so bogged down that I slip beneath the whelming tide.

So here’s what I’m doing to keep myself engaged in things beyond the walls of campus, my email inbox, and my stack of unfinished obligations for others.

Thing the First

I was absolutely thrilled to be included (along with my buddy R. Scott Moore) in the Panayotis Panayides and Ine Jacobs volume, Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology Between Six and Eighth Centuries (2022). This volume was one of those books that came from a conference held a few years ago in the UK, and I have to admit that I typically don’t have much in the way of expectations for these kinds of books.

This book is an exception, though. I’ve been reading around in it over the last week or so, checking out a chapter here and there when I find the time, and I’ve come away thoroughly impressed with both the quality of research that went into these papers and their scope. For example, Pamela Armstrong and Guy Sander’s paper on “Kourion in the Long Late Antiquity: a reassessment” fundamentally re-dated the later phases at this site and showed how their new chronology of well-known Late Roman fine wares will have an impact on our understanding of these centuries. Panayiotis Panayides chapter “Cypriot cities at the end of Antiquity,” pulls together the evidence for Salamis, Nea Paphos, Amathus, and Kourion to argue that the oft-assumed argument for these cities’ decline in the 7th century was, in fact, far more complex. Jody Gordon’s concluding essay, “The ‘fuzzy’ world of Cypriot Long Late Antiquity: continuity and disruption betwixt the global and local,” offers a blueprint for new ways of thinking about these centuries.

This is just scratching the surface of this rich volume. I haven’t had time to read pieces by Luca Zavagno, Marcus Rautman, Athanasios K. Vionis, Olga Karagiorgou, Georgios Deligiannakis, Evangelos Chrysos, and Young Richard Kim! 

Thing the Second

I’ve been really enjoying the gaggle of articles scheduled to appear in the next issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology but now available as “online first” articles from the journal. These pieces are part of an issue coedited by Attila Dézsi and LouAnn Wurst on the theme of “Theorizing Capitalism’s Cracks.” Like the volume on Cyprus in the long late antiquity, I’ve not had time to read everything in this forthcoming issue, but what I’ve read seems pretty great.

Michael Roller’s piece, ““The Song of Love”: An Archaeology of Radio History and Surveillance Capitalism” had me at vacuum tubes, but deftly weaves together archaeological evidence, census data, and history of the radio to argue for its role in creating “machinic consumerism” of the interwar decades and anticipating contemporary surveillance capitalism of the internet age. He also argued that radio had subversive potential as well. The distribution of radio sets in his well-know study site of the coal mining towns of Lattimer, Pennsylvania suggest that immigrant groups listened to the radio collectively rather than as nuclear families in their own homes. More than that, Roller goes on to argue that the emergence f pirate radio stations in the US (and abroad) demonstrates something inherently democratic about this medium. I’m doing this typically dense, nuanced, and thoughtful article a disservice by my description here. If you can check it out.    

There are a few more intriguing pieces in this issue. Eric Drake’s “Envisioning Logging Camps as Sites of Social Antagonism in Capitalism: An Anishinaabe Example from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan” offers a window into Native American life in a Michigan logging camp and show how forms of Native American anticapitalism emerged even in a landscape increasing defined by capitalist extraction. Aaron Howe’s article, “The City and the City: Tent Camps and Luxury Development in the NoMA Business Improvement District (BID) in Washington, D.C.” makes an uncited reference to China Mieville’s novel The City and The City and then presents some of his dissertation research on a homeless encampment in Washington, DC. Rachael Kiddey’s “We Are Displaced, But We Are More Than That: Using Anarchist Principles to Materialize Capitalism’s Cracks at Sites of Contemporary Forced Displacement in Europe,” which I’ve just started reading does what it says on the box! 

Needless to say, I’ll have to steady my hand as I make revisions on my book chapters not to add references to this recent flock of critical and incisive articles. 

Thing the Third

Finally, I’m starting to get excited about a project that started last spring as part of my first effort to teach a graduate seminar in English. Titled, Campus Building, it is a thoughtful and engaged effort to document Merrifield Hall on the University of North Dakota’s campus in the months before it undergoes radical renovations. The layout is done. The content is done. And the volume is almost ready to go to press. 

I can’t wait to share the book and the story behind it with folks here on the ole blog. It is a more than worthy step beyond what I attempted to do with the Wesley College Documentation Project. 

What Time Is This Place (Part 2)

This past weekend, I put aside some of my irrational qualms about reading an older book and dove head first into Kevin Lynch’s What Time Is This Place? (MIT 1972). I was stunned by how prescient the book appeared to be, and in my post yesterday started to observe how nearly every chapter explored issues that tangentially related, in some way, to my own research and interest.

I’ll continue that practice today starting with chapter 6. 

6. Boston Time. This chapter is a photo essay that starts with images of clocks in Boston before proceeding to trace the changing character of the city as it represents the changes in Boston time. The opening images invariably reminded me of Scott W. Schwartz’s new book, The Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape (2022) which I blogged about here. Schwartz notes the prevalence of clocks and temperature displays in cities and parallels the experience of time with temperature. Both tend to be represented in absolute (or at very least numerical) terms, but experienced in physical ways. As I write this its -5° F outside here, which is quite cold but not terribly unusual for this time of year. Such consistently low temperatures makes the 30° F days we experienced late last week feel downright balmy. In the same way that the 45 minutes that I’m waiting for the Eagles playoff game to start (I’m writing this on a Sunday), will speed along provided I continue to try to finish this blog post. If I were to put aside my computer, time would slow to a drag.

7. Change Made Visible. The chapter on the ways in which changes are visible, reminded me a good bit of my work with students on the Wesley College Documentation Project. In this project, we documented two buildings on campus between their abandonment and their demolition. The buildings were laced with evidence for the passage of time both in the ways that they were adapted over their century of use to the immediate decisions their most recent residents made when they decamped for the final time. At the end of our work in the building — immediately before asbestos mitigation began — we put on a concert in building’s former recital hall. The weeks before the buildings’ scheduled demolition, we had a short ceremony recognizing their memorial function on our campus. These events made the passage of time visible. You can see some of the work here.

8. Managing Transitions. In his chapter on managing transitions, it is hard to avoid thinking of the recent work on migrants of various kinds. In some ways, Lynch seems to anticipate some of the ways in which we thought about the spaces of “man camps” in Western North Dakota during the Bakken boom. These camps embodied a landscape caught in a kind of transition between low density rural settlements and the concentrated workforce necessary to support extractive industries. The ephemerality of the oil industry presented a landscape that we always only transitioning and contingent. The communities of the Bakken struggled to manage the contingency of the boom in part because the landscape preserved so little from previous booms to remind these communities how they adapted to the stress of demographic change. Elsewhere in the world the architecture of migration reflected the transitional state that migrants often find themselves as they depart economically, environmentally, or politically compromised homes and seek new ones.  

9. Environmental Change and Social Change. One way that Lynch’s work shows its age is when he talks about environmental change. In the 21st century, our mind naturally turn to thoughts about climate change rather than changes in our built environment. Lynch remains optimistic that build environments can transform social experiences. I’ve been watching my institution try to transform campus culture through architecture over the last decade. For example, the university has changed most classrooms into active learning type spaces and, as a result, students (and faculty) have come to expect both active learning and teaching techniques suited to these spaces. Alternately, the campus has invested in architectural forms and spaces designed to promote informal gathering, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a consistent sense of campus. I’ve suggested that these two impulses — student space and a consistent campus — are not necessarily complementary. 

10. Some Policies for Changing Things. Kevin Lynch made his name as an urban planner so it is hardly surprising that he concludes this book with some reflections on policy. The most compelling of these is that suggestion that we think more deliberately about the temporary rhythms and routines we expect of our students and peers. As someone who is unnaturally preoccupied with synchronizing my own schedule with clock time, I have to admit that I’d struggle with a policy that allows greater freedom for individuals to organize their lives according to different temporal rhythms. That said, I don’t think it would be bad for me to have to encounter that. Even little things like allowing students to turn in papers in their own time and developing the patience to deal with people and processes that operate on different times serve as useful reminders that I should not reduce time to a fungible commodity, but as a deeply personal form of social experience. 

Reading an older book as a way to become aware of how the passage of time enriches and transforms how we read and understand a classic text is a wonderful reminder that as creatures of the present, we are never quite free from the past and recognizing the different rhythms of life and senses of time that operate around us should not be a burden. Instead, experiences different senses of time should enrich our experiences and our ability to appreciate our world.

Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a short paper that examines a class that I taught a few years ago to document the two buildings associated with Wesley College on the University of North Dakota campus. This class ran as a 1-credit companion to a 3-credit course on the university budget.

I finally have a more or less final draft prepared. The paper argues my one credit course embraced what I call a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that rejected the outcome oriented approaches favored by the institution. 

Figure 1

You can read the paper here and do let me know what you think.

Teaching Tuesday: The Wesley College Documentation Project as Radical Pedagogy 2

It’s the end of the semester and I’m running on fumes. Unfortunately, my enervated state does not dictate my deadlines and the end of the semester is always a cruel juxtaposition deadlines and exhaustion.

Nevertheless, I continue to plug away at various projects with the vague hope of gaining momentum once grading is done and grades are submitted. Below is a revised version of the concluding discussion to my paper. It’s … not great, but the ideas are finally all there. I’ve been slogging on this for so long that I really need to put it aside for a bit and come back to it with a fresh editing pen and clearer eyes.

You can read the first part of the paper here. Just stop reading at the Reflections and Discussion section and come to this page.

Feedback is always welcome! 

Reflections and Discussion

From the start, I did not design this class to produce a particular outcome. As a result, there is no measure against which I could assess its success or failure. Indeed, the absence of any anticipated outcome as an objective undercut the need for a particularly explicit pedagogy. While we talked casually about the technology that we had at our disposal (notebooks, cameras, and our phones) and matters of access to the building, mostly I encouraged the students to engage the space creatively and to allow their curiosity to dictate their approaches to knowledge making. This informality encouraged the students to follow the lead of the objects and buildings themselves to the archives and various observations and discoveries reflected a pedagogical experience anchored in a form of free inquiry structured by the buildings themselves. Most of the reflections in the following section derive from hindsight, but this retroactive approach to understand the character of the course may well offer some salient points for future efforts in constructing distinctive possibile pedagogies for the archaeology of the contemporary world.

The idea of an approach to teaching that eschews narrowly defined or content oriented outcomes is hardly revolutionary. Paolo Fiere’s oft-cited critique of the “banking model of education,” for example, offered a collaborative model for adult learning where learners and teachers create new knowledge together through dialogue. Fiere’s skepticism toward contemporary education resonated in part with Paul Goodman’s call to abolish most educational institutions and Ivan Illich’s nearly contemporary notion of “deschooling.” Fiere, Goodman, and Illich regarded most contemporary schooling as a mechanism for social and economic control and championed more open-ended, collaborative, and hand-on approaches as a means of unlocking the emancipatory potential of education. In more recent years, a steady stream of scholars have sought to reconcile the institutional constraints of higher education and the desire of more emancipatory or even transgressive learning (e.g. hooks 1994; Gannon 2020). In fact, as higher education has become increasingly associated with work force development and shaped by private capital (e.g. Newfield 2016) the need to imagine alternatives that work to critique or even subvert existing systems of learning has become more urgent. Recent calls for ungrading, for example, stress the role that grading plays in sorting and ranking students. This not only reinforces the role of education as a tool for determining the value of students in the market, but also exerts an outsized role on student expectations and the classroom experience where grades become the goal rather than learning. Dispensing with grades, as I did in this course, is often associated with efforts to critique marketplace models of education that require or least imply winners and losers. While efforts to imagine alternatives to current approaches to higher education (e.g. Staley 2019) often seek to challenge or subvert the marketplace model (e.g. Menand), sustained external pressures from a wide range of stakeholders continue to push institutions to adopt the practices of the private sector with their concern for efficiency, competition, and economy.

The students and I discussed many of the trends shaping higher education in the course on the university budget. We noted in particular the rise of incentive based budget models and the arguments that these models reward efficient production of outcomes and results. This emphasis on efficiency invariable informed some of the ideas that I was developing at this time associated with the concept of “slow archaeology” (Caraher 2016; Caraher 2019). Slow archaeology in its various forms emphasizes the value of a sustained engagement with spaces and objects and the use of less structured recording methods alongside and often in constrast to more formal and digital field techniques. In this way, it sought to critique the role that efficiency has come to play both in archaeological methodology and across contemporary society (e.g. Alexander 2008). The modern origins of archaeological practice favored specialized skills, neatly delineated procedures, and hierarchy which produced knowledge making practices susceptible to digital tools and their claims to increased efficiency. In the late-20th and early 21st century, a modern economy shaped by the “great acceleration” (McNeil 2014) has stressed the need for speed and efficiency in archaeology not only to keep pace with with development (Zorin 2015) but also to document the transformations wrought by rising sea levels and climate change. In North Dakota, specifically, the early-21st-century Bakken oil boom created a similar boom in archaeological work amid the reshaping of the Western North Dakota landscape in service of extractive industries. The role that archaeology played in the controversies surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline made clear that super modernity (sensu González-Ruibal 2008; 2018) recognized archaeology and heritage as simply another input into the complex financial equations designed to produce resources in the most efficient way possible. As many of the students enrolled in the Wesley College class were also enrolled in my concurrent course on the university budget where we discussed issues such as “deferred maintenance” that allocated the costs of maintaining campus buildings to the disadvantage of older structures which not only preserved significant memories but also required more upkeep by dint of their age alone.

The status of the Wesley College buildings as schedule for demolition and largely abandoned created a sense of urgency in our work, but, at the same time, we understood that the university had made arrangement for a more formal documentation processes. This process, however, tended to emphasize the architectural and design elements of these buildings rather than the evidence for their everyday use. As a result, some in the preservationist community fear that formal and procedural aspects of documentation have failed to engage the emotional, social, and dynamic aspects of historic architecture (for a recent summary see: Kaufman 2019). Thus, the class’s work in these buildings offered a counterweight to archaeological and resource management approaches driven by methods or formal requirements. By starting our study of the buildings with the things left behind rather than methodology or procedures, we foregrounded the role of curiosity and interest in archaeological practices. As James Flexner has argued in his recent calls for “degrowth“ in archaeology developing practices that foreground a shared interest in the past between practitioners and the public as a way of subverting product and outcome oriented approaches to field work (Flexner 2020).

This approach resonated with the students in my class who likewise occupied a middle ground between being insiders to the college campus and as outsiders to the inner workings of the university made them particularly motivated collaborators. In fact, the entire course relied on the students’ eagerness to transgress the traditional limits of student movement on campus and enter into spaces typically reserved for faculty offices and laboratories. Students were also allowed to explore the buildings in far more physical ways than they would other buildings on campus where the administration would discourage tearing up carpets and punching holes in walls. While we often assume that college campuses are the domain of students, in reality however, university administrators and faculty often design campuses to restrict student movement. In some cases, this involves small scale barriers which delineate faculty office where students might occasionally venture, but rarely stay for long, from classroom and public spaces where campus authors expect and encourage students to gather. Campuses also contain numerous spaces accessed only by administrators, maintenance and facilities personnel, housing and dining staffs, and other specialized employees whose collective work to keep campus warm, safe, clean, and functional was kept out of public view. Students efforts to document spaces associated with service areas, faculty, staff, and departmental offices, and laboratories provided a kind of material analogue to more bureaucratic and procedural discussions that we were having in the course of the university budget.

By allowing student interests to start with the objects and spaces that they encountered in these buildings, the class anticipated some of the approaches modeled by Christopher Witmore in his “chorography” of the landscape of the northeastern Peloponnesus. Witmore’s chorography foregrounded the role of objects, places, and space as opposed to practices, methods, and institutions in producing the freedom for new kinds of knowledge (Witmore 2020). In much the same way that Witmore modeled in his book, the students and I walked through, talked about, and worked together to understand the spaces and objects present in these buildings. We followed leads, debated theories, and relied on our range of experiences and interests to create and share our distinct experiences. The resulting photo essay (Atchley 201x), musical composition, publications (Caraher et al. 2019), and events represented only a narrow window into our time in the building. The irreducibility of the experiences that spending time in these buildings provided evoked the Witmore’s concern for the transformation of the countryside by super modernity. Spending time in the Wesley College buildings led the students to develop a greater sensitivity toward the changing economic realities facing campus, the history that the Wesley College buildings embodied, and the ease with which they could be erased from both the campus plan and memory. Of course, it would be easy to overstate the connections between Witmore’s magisterial book and a group of students in a one-credit university course (especially since his book appeared two years after the course was over). That said, Witmore’s openness to the instigations and provocations provided by the objects in the Greeks landscape challenges conventional approaches to archaeological work that looks toward rigorous methods to mediate between the material world and our curiosity.

In a general way, offering students access to buildings that were caught between abandonment and demolition and spaces that were both part of campus and often hidden from their view supported my unstructured pedagogy of the course and our collective decisions to eschew formal standards of archaeological documentation. The class deliberately operated at the edges of archaeological methods, expected pedagogical practices, and the history of campus itself. These conditions allowed us to understand how archaeology of the contemporary world could engage actives sites, political fraught spaces, and approaches that push the discipline of archaeology itself to reflect more deliberately on its own methods and goals. Of particular significance was how our class provided an opportunity to produce a plan that not only adapted to the character of the buildings but also the interests of the students. This allowed for priorities to develop on the fly and for the students to shift their interest seamlessly from the materiality of the buildings and the assemblage left behind in various spaces to the archives and performance.

Archaeology of the contemporary world’s attention to dynamic, active, and changing sites has invariably led to a wider range of field practices as well as a deeper engagement with stakeholders who exist outside of the traditional purview archaeology as a discipline. The sites of homeless squats, music festivals, protests encampments, and the movements of undocumented migrants often leave either intentionally ephemeral material traces. Assemblages associated with the ongoing pandemic, for example, appear to change daily or even hourly in response to community attitudes and official policies. The contingencies associated with “fast urbanism” have likewise complicated the applicability of conventional archaeological methodology and procedures to documenting complex assemblages. The various communities associated with this material also have distinct views of their own identities and their materiality that reward approaches anchored in collaboration rather than abstracted ideas of methodology and practice. My one-credit course represented an effort to explore the pedagogical potential for a collaborative archaeology of the contemporary world.

Teaching Tuesday: The Wesley College Documentation Project as Radical Pedagogy

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been chipping on a paper that reflect on the Wesley College Documentation project as an approach to teaching the archaeology of the contemporary world. I’m about two thirds of the way through the paper and thought I should probably share a draft of it.

I’m moderately happy with what I have on the page so far. The paper will be a bit backward in that I am writing from the perspective of practice that I then analyze through reflections later. This approach is both honest, in that I didn’t really have a pedagogy or a plan when I put this class together, and I suspect reflects an authentic account of how my experience in the Wesley College buildings and with this group of students shaped my understanding of teaching.

Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter

Introduction

In an American context, teaching and the study of the archaeology of the contemporary world have always existed together. Schiffer and Gould’s seminal, Modern Material Culture features an article by Schiffer and Wilke titled: “The Modern Material-Culture Field School: Teaching Archaeology on the University Campus” which, as the title suggests, used the material culture of the University of Arizona campus as a context for teaching archaeological methods and interpretation. Similarly, Bill Rathje’s “Garbage Project” which took place at the same institution at the same time, grew out of his efforts to introduce undergraduates both to sampling and behavioral archaeology through the systematic study of domestic trash collected from Tuscon neighborhoods. The last 40 years have continued to see a steady stream of studies that demonstrate how the contemporary university campus can provide a compelling site for teaching archaeology.

Most of these campus projects focused on using modern material and contexts to instruct students in the systematic practices associated with traditional archaeology: sampling, surface collection, mapping, recording, and stratigraphic excavation. It is notable that despite the attention to modern material and research questions significant to contemporary campus life such as the disposal of trash or locations of cigarette smokers (citations), most published efforts to use material culture to document life on American college campuses appear to have avoided methods that engage more fully with conversations in field of archaeology of the contemporary world. For example, most of these approaches did not seem to emphasize the growing role that time-based media, particularly video and audio recordings, have come to play in the archaeology of the contemporary world. I also wonder whether they have emphasized the potential of unstructured textual recording to capture the experience of both familiar and unfamiliar spaces and places. In fact, the emphasis on systematic methods, practices, and procedures as part of most archaeology of the contemporary campus reinforced the kind of modern structures that archaeology of the contemporary world has sometimes sought to critique or even subvert. The course that I taught in the spring of 2018 developed in such a way that it blended open ended documentation practices and experiential learning with archival research, public outreach, and performance to create a distinctive learning experience for students.

The following chapter will reflect on a course taught on the campus of the University of North Dakota in 2018. The course focused on two pairs of buildings on campus, Corwin/Larimore and Robertson/Sayre Halls, which were demolished in the early summer of that year. The buildings were built between 1909 and 1929 in the Beaux Arts style as the main buildings for an institution called Wesley College founded in 19xx. Wesley College was a Methodist institution that taught music, religion, and elocution and offered housing to students in two dormitories, Sayre Hall for men and Larimore Hall for women. Students taking classes at Wesley College would also be enrolled at the University of North Dakota, a public four-year, state funded institution, and receive their degrees from UND. In 1965, a financially failing Wesley College was purchased and absorbed into UND and the four buildings served as dorms, offices, classrooms, laboratories, and the home of UND’s honors program of the next 50 or so years. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the buildings had acquired considerable deferred maintenance debt and their demolition was ordered as part of a general effort to reduce the campus footprint and refresh it public face along the main thoroughfare through campus.

The course that I taught involved exploring and documenting these buildings in the window between their abandonment as active campus structures and their final demolition. As the buildings themselves represented some of the oldest structure on our campus. the university administration treated their destruction with a certain amount of seriousness and employed a local contractor to prepare a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) Type 2 report on the buildings and had the demolition contractor prepare a high resolution laser scan of the buildings. This routine, but robust level of documentation ensured that the buildings received formal architectural recording worthy of their designs and distinctive place in the history of the campus. There was less formal interest, however, in documenting their interior state which involved both numerous intervention over their lifetimes and the detritus of both their recent abandonment and their changing roles on campus. The class that I taught on these buildings focused initially on the buildings’ situations between use and demolition.

The course ran as a one-credit add on to a class on that focused on the university budget. After several decades of regular budget and enrollment increases, the University of North Dakota was enduring a painful period of contraction with several high profile program cuts including our star-studded women’s ice hockey team and the nationally recognized music therapy program. At the same time, the university was implementing a new internal budgeting model that regularly bore the brunt of campus-wide frustrations regarding the distribution of resources. Instability in administrative leadership, the increasingly populist and often anti-intellectual political culture of the state, and challenges associated with communicating effectively across a wide range of campus stakeholders contributed to confusion and at times anger toward the university administration. A course on the university budget was meant to create an opportunity to engage with the changes on our campus in a way informed by a more detailed and accurate understanding to the actual mechanisms of funding, the national conversation about higher education in the US, and the particular historical developments at our campus. The course on the university budget prompted student interest in changes on campus and this, in turn, prompted me to offer a course on the buildings scheduled for demolition later that year. This was done without much planning or thought about what this course would look like.

The spontaneous creation of the course focused on the Wesley College buildings discouraged any particularly formal structure. The course was offered for one academic credit, which is the lowest academic value possible for a course on our campus. In fact, its spontaneity and low academic stakes allowed the course to operate at the very fringes of the panoptic perspectives of campus administrators. It both eluded the gaze of the technocrats whose authority rests on structures associated with assessment and fell outside the purview of the faculty committees who also seek to establish authority in the contested space of the American college classroom. In this way the course existed outside administrative oversight which allowed us a significant amount of freedom in class design. As significantly, the buildings themselves occupied a strangely liminal status between abandonment and their final destruction. The university had turned off all but emergency utilities, had locked the outside doors of the buildings, and faculty and staff has removed all the objects from the building that could be reused or repurposed on campus. Thus, my students had free rein within the buildings, and the university facilities staff was only too eager to help students explore what was under the carpeting, behind walls, and above false ceilings. Because the buildings were slated for demolition, there was no concern for their material condition and all the interior rooms were unlocked and accessible to student curiosity. A liminal class that existed in a liminal space seem ideally suited to approaches that are typical of archaeology of the contemporary world.

The Class

The class itself began with a brief introduction to the building, their history, and the archaeology of the contemporary world. We then set about to explore the structures armed with notebooks, a few cameras scavenged from departmental and personal supplies, measuring tapes, and their mobile phones. Since this class was quite spontaneous, we did not have any idea exactly what we would find in the buildings. The students were immediately taken by the level of access that we had to the building. Students could enter faculty offices, laboratory spaces, classrooms, and maintenance spaces that in most active buildings on campus had access restrictions. The ability to move through a building without any barriers is something that most faculty take more or less for granted, although we would like pause before barreling into a colleague’s or program’s laboratory space uninvited or into an active classroom. It was clear, however, that for students, these spaces was far less familiar and part of what drew them through the building was a sense that they were transgressing traditional campus boundaries. Because we had not arranged for any storage space or study area where we could scrutinize objects more closely, we came to realize that we could not systematically collect artifacts from the building. Instead, we decided as a group to focus on describing the objects left behind in situ in our notebooks according to each office. At the same time, we devised a method of taking photos and using phones to take videos of the rooms in the buildings as we went. We also concluded that we should start with Corwin/Larimore Hall, which had been entirely abandoned, and then proceeding to Robertson/Sayre Hall, where staff were still moving out of their offices.

Almost immediately, we encountered rooms with massive numbers of artifacts left behind. These ranged from office and classroom furniture to laboratories with masses of cables, computers, and equipment used in psychological testing that appeared utterly foreign to the students. In some cases, offices appear to be frozen in time. A single late-20th century Apple iMac computer stood on a desk as if frozen in the year 2000. In other cases, office and laboratories look like they had been rooted through during a burglary. Other rooms initially appeared carefully abandoned only to reveal during documentation some kind of intimate trace that connected the empty office to its earlier occupant. The situations in these offices, labs, and classroom, drew student efforts to delve deeply into the contents of rooms. They looked inside desk drawers, documented the patterns of adhesive tape left on the back of doors, and explored the spaces above acoustic ceiling tiles. One student, Wyatt Atchley, an avid photographer, prepared a photo essay that drew out the traces of the building’s recent past and connected it with recent discussions of austerity that we were having in the sister course on the university budget. The intimacy of his photographs reflected the growing commitment that the students felt not only toward this course, but also toward these building.

As they did this work, the students invariably started to notice various construction scars throughout the building and started to piece together the history of these buildings adaptations over time. One of the challenges that we faced in studying these buildings is that the original blue prints were not preserved. In fact, as we started to recognize that complex histories of these buildings we decamped to the University Archives where we poured through various collections in an effort to trace the changes made to the buildings over time. This was not guided by a kind of architectural fundamentalism, but by questions that originated in the space of the Corwin/Larimore and Robertson/Sayre halls. Questions that emerged through the students’ relentless exploration of the space triggered their interest in piecing together how they changed over time through photographs, technical plans, and any other sources of information that might reveal their histories. For example, the students and I quickly recognized the large classroom in Corwin Hall with its distinctive low arched ceiling as the former recital hall of Wesley College’s music program. When the building was modified to accommodate offices and classrooms, the builders truncated room’s north side, where the proscenium would have stood, and replaced it with a wall and chalk boards. Despite this modified condition, the students and some colleagues across campus understood the potential of recording the acoustics of this space as both a gesture to the room’s history as performance space and as a chance to document the building’s acoustic signature. We have published the results of this work in collaboration with some of Atchley’s photographs in Epoiesen.

In Sayre Hall, the students and I were confused by a strange pattern of wood slats affixed the the ceiling of a room in Sayre Hall but hidden by the drop ceiling. These wood slats once supported a coffered ceiling and revealed the room to the formal sitting room of the Sayre Hall dormitory. The photographs that the students found in the University Archives revealed turn-of-the-century space worthy of the “jazz age” tastes of pre-depression America complete with potted ferns, an elaborate fireplace, and terrazzo floor with mosaic inlays. A return visit to the room led us to tear up the institutional wall-to-wall carpeting to reveal the more elegant flooring beneath. Efforts to find the fireplace, immured over the course of innumerable renovations to the space, were less fruitful, but nevertheless engaged the students’ curiosity.

Time in the archives led the students to perhaps the most spectacular find associated with the Wesley College buildings. Amid the various record associated with the soliciting of funds from donors and the construction of the buildings was a folder associated with the relationship between the Sayre family and the long-serving president of Wesley College, Edward P. Robertson. In these papers was the story of A.J. Sayre’s son, Harold Holt Sayre, who had died in World War I. In 1918, Roberston honored the request of A.J. Sayre and changed the name of Sayre Hall to Harold H. Sayre Hall as a memorial to his son’s sacrifice. Included in the folder associated with this correspondence was a four-page poem, ”At the Grave of a Dead Gunner” written by Horace Shidler. Sayre was the gunner in the plane that Shidler had piloted. This touching tribute affected the class deeply and transformed the process of documenting these buildings from one driven by curiosity to one driven by a sense of deep respect for not only Sayre’s memory, but the students, faculty, administrators, and staff who had passed through these buildings. Later that week students discovered names carved into a pane of window glass in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914. These students lived in room in Sayre Hall before going on to careers in law, higher education, and business. One of the students, however, died in France in World War I and once again connected this building to centennial reflections taking place in both the US and Europe to mark the conclusion of the “Great War.”

Students produced all these discoveries, and they became increasingly motivated that our work do more than simply document these buildings in their abandoned state. Through ongoing conversations both in the buildings and in the University Archives, we came to recognize that the ongoing use of these buildings served to keep the memories of Sayre and Wesley College students evergreen and the demolition of the buildings would break the connections between the lived space of campus and the Great War. To mark this transformation the students helped coordinate a final event for the buildings and invited the university president, representatives of the city of Grand Forks, the campus Reserve Officers Training Corp, and, perhaps most importantly, the commanding officer of the Grand Forks Air Force Base to speak at a ceremony recognizing the loss that these buildings will mean to campus memory. A colleague in the department of history provided a brief historical survey of the Great War and a colleague from the department of English played bagpipes to amplify the solemnity of the occasion. The weather cooperated and on a brilliant spring day, we recognized the buildings and those who they honored.

Reflections and Discussion

From the start, I did not design this class to produce a particular outcome. As a result, there is no measure against which I could assess its success or failure. Indeed, the absence of any anticipated outcome as an objective undercut the need for a particularly explicit pedagogy. While we talked casually about the technology that we had at our disposal (notebooks, cameras, and our phones) and matters of access to the building, mostly I encouraged the students to engage the space creatively and to allow their curiosity to dictate their approaches to knowledge making. This informality encouraged the students to follow the lead of the objects and buildings themselves to the archives and various observations and discoveries reflected a pedagogical experience anchored in a form of free inquiry structured by the buildings themselves. Most of the reflections in the following section derive from hindsight, but this retroactive approach to understand the character of the course may well offer some salient points for future efforts in constructing distinctive possibile pedagogies for the archaeology of the contemporary world.

The idea of an approach to teaching that eschews narrowly defined outcomes is hardly revolutionary. Paolo Fiere’s oft-cited critique of the “banking model of education,” for example, offered a collaborative model for adult learning where learners and teachers create new knowledge together through dialogue. Fiere’s skepticism toward contemporary education resonated in part with Paul Goodman’s call to abolish most educational institutions and Ivan Illich’s nearly contemporary notion of “deschooling.” Fiere, Goodman, and Illich regarded most contemporary schooling as a mechanism for social and economic control and championed more open-ended, collaborative, and hand-on approaches as a means of unlocking the emancipatory potential of education. In more recent years, a steady stream of scholars have sought to reconcile the institutional constraints of higher education and the desire of more emancipatory or even transgressive learning (e.g. hooks 1994; Gannon 2020). In fact, as higher education has become increasingly associated with work force development and shaped by private capital (e.g. Newfield 2016) the need to imagine alternatives that work to critique or even subvert existing systems of learning has become more urgent. Recent calls for ungrading, for example, stress the role that grading plays in sorting and ranking students. This not only reinforces the role of education as a tool for determining the value of students in the market, but also exerts an outsized role on student expectations and the classroom experience where grades become the goal rather than learning. Dispensing with grades, as I did in this course, is often associated with efforts to critique marketplace models of education that require or least imply winners and losers. While efforts to imagine alternatives to current approaches to higher education (e.g. Staley 2019) often seek to challenge or subvert the marketplace model (e.g. Menand), sustained external pressures from a wide range of stakeholders continue to push institutions to adopt the practices of the private sector with their concern for efficiency, competition, and economy.

The students and I discussed many of the trends shaping higher education in the course on the university budget and they invariable informed some of the ideas that I was developing associated with “slow archaeology” (Caraher 2016; Caraher 2019). Slow archaeology in its various forms emphasizes the value of a sustained engagement with spaces and objects and the use of less structured recording methods alongside and often in constrast to more formal and digital field techniques. Slow archaeology critiqued the outsized role of efficiency in contemporary society. The modern origins of archaeological practice favored specialized skills, neatly delineated procedures, and hierarchy which produced knowledge making practices susceptible to digital tools and their claims to increased efficiency. This coincided with the role of archaeology and cultural resource management in a modern economy shaped by the “great acceleration.” In North Dakota, specifically, the early-21st-century Bakken oil boom created a similar boom in archaeological work amid the reshaping of the Western North Dakota landscape in service of extractive industries. The role that archaeology played in the controversies surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline made clear that supermodernity (sensu González-Ruibal 2008; 2018) recognized archaeology and heritage as simply another input into the complex financial equations designed to produce resources in the most efficient way possible. As many of the students enrolled in the Wesley College class were also enrolled in my concurrent course on the university budget where we discussed issues such as “deferred maintenance” that allocated the costs of maintaining campus buildings to the disadvantage of older structures which not only preserved significant memories but also required more maintenance by dint of their age alone.

The methods taken by my students and I anticipated some of the approaches modeled by Christopher Witmore in his “chorography” of the landscape of the northeastern Peloponnesus with its emphasis on the role of objects, places, and space as opposed to practices, methods, and institutions in producing the freedom for new kinds of knowledge (Witmore 2020). In much the same way that Whitmore modeled in his book, the students and I walked through, talked about, and worked together to understand the spaces and objects present in these buildings. We followed leads, debated theories, and relied on our range of experiences and interests to create and share our distinct experiences. The resulting photo essay (Atchley 201x), musical composition, publications (Caraher et al. 2019), and events represented only a narrow window into our time in the building. The irreducibility of the experiences that spending time in these buildings provided evoked the Whitmore’s concern for the transformation of the countryside by supermodernity. Spending time in the Wesley College buildings led the students to develop a greater sensitivity toward the changing economic realities facing campus, the history that the Wesley College buildings embodied, and the ease with which they could be erased from both the campus plan and memory. It goes without saying that it would be easy to overstate the connections between Witmore’s magisterial book and a group of students in a one-credit university course especially since the book appeared two years after the course was over. That said, Witmore’s openness to the instigations and provocations provided by the objects in the Greeks landscape challenges conventional approaches to archaeological work that looks toward rigorous methods to mediate between the material world and our curiosity.

Graffiti

A correspondence with Justin Walsh of the International Space Station Archaeological Project nudged me to return to Susan A. Phillips’s work on graffiti in Los Angeles. I had read some of her articles on graffiti and its relationship to Los Angeles history and late-20th-century gang culture, but for reasons that are hard to understand I had neither integrated this into my chapter on cities in my book, nor had read her rather recent book The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti.

It goes without saying that Phillips work is fantastic especially as she traces the intermingling of Los Angeles urban history (and ecology) and the practices and places of graffiti. It gets even more intriguing when she tracks the history of urban writing (up through tagging) — in the era before large scale graffiti mitigation and the rise of massive, roller assisted, street art — through the 1990s and anchors these in the significant subcultures in the Los Angeles area. The role of hobos, railroad workers, punks, immigrants, military men, neighborhood kids, queers, and various other vibrant subcultures made their marks on the urban landscape. 

As a kid growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, I had always been fascinated by the graffiti that I saw especially on schools that had been mothballed around north Wilmington. (I remember vividly the massive cruciform graffito of The Who on the side of Forward Junior High School as a kid and wondering about it). Most of this graffiti was mystifying to me. I didn’t understand tags, street art, or any of the other conventions, but I did admire the appearance of names and art across the landscape that I knew so well. 

One of the really curious things about my community here in North Dakota is that there is almost no graffiti anywhere. There are a few odd marks on the Washington Street underpass and of course the rail yard ensures that we have a constant flow of decorated train cars through town. I’ve heard there was some painting on the tunnel under Route 2 near Wilder School years back, but my impression is that it’s gone. There is an occasional tag or stencil in the tunnel under Columbia Road on UND’s campus, but that’s usually painted over. Remarkably the city is defined by its flood walls, but I’ve never seen any graffiti on these wall (and I frequent the the parks created by the flood walls). As Mos Def quipped: “there’s a city full of walls to post complaints at.” But, maybe the lack of graffiti suggests that there is very little reason for the kind of pent up anxieties that manifested in graffiti or that the youthful exuberance that supported the desire to make one’s name known has been channeled into other, undoubtedly more “wholesome” (or at least more closely supervised) activities. 

One place where I did recognize graffiti was on UND’s campus, particularly in the Wesley College building sand I’m still kicking myself for not documenting it as intensively as we should have. Some of it we did photograph, such as these inscribed bricks found on the east wall of Robinson-Sayre Hall and these inscribed widows pains from Sayre Hall. 

Some of the best graffiti however was found inscribed into the solid wood furniture that had made its way into the soon to be demolished buildings. The graffiti here followed conventions and practices tracked by Phillips in many situations across Los Angeles. The writers, almost certainly students, carved their names, their initials, their feelings, and an assortment of dates into the table top along with band names and lyrics, fraternity and sorority names, and various other sentiments common to college students.

P1010220

P1010226

The earliest graffito on the desk dates to 1956.

P1010232

But the most interesting is a sequence of dates starting in 1975 and updated into the 1990s (and the last date added was 2012).

P1010228

This table most likely was destroyed during the demolition of the building but it represents a remarkable find demonstrating over 60 years of continuity in student practices on campus. In an era replete with invented traditions, it is curious that we didn’t find anything more remarkable (or worth saving) in this far more authentic example of student culture.

What makes it all the more painful is that the rapid transformation of our campus over the last few years has made such long-lasting artifacts more and rare. Solid wood tables, chairs, and surfaces continuously visible for decades have become a rarity on our campus. In their place is an assortment of quickly discarded fiber board furniture, hard plastic chairs that have shorter lifespans than even the technologically dependent classrooms where they stand, and new, unblemished modern surfaces. These clean and disposable surfaces and contexts are obviously ironic. They offer new and prospective students the feeling of recently renovated hotel, prepare just for them, while obscuring the real marks of generations of students, faculty, and staff. They mimic the historical architectural forms of collegiate Gothic buildings with their suggestions of continuity and persistence, while replacing decades-old furnishing with the latest in laminated particle board and moulded plastic. In short, campus leaders eagerly transform the materiality of their institutions into the kind of benign (and sanitary) non-places expected of their short term residents (and their parents), while assuring the students that they can, figurative, make their mark on campus as part of a peerless tradition (that is neatly erased in time for the incoming class’s arrival).

I had the good fortune of attending Ohio State in the 1990s before the campus and its surroundings had become gentrified. Some of my fondest memories revolve around encountering the burry division between campus and the gritty surrounding community and realizing two contradictory things. First, the patina on campus reminded me that I was just a visitor here and one of many such visitors who had lived, studied, worked, and played in this place. But then, this also encouraged me to recognize that my ephemeral marks on campus — whether graffito or a well-trod path or a memory deeply inscribed in a particular place — contributed to its material form in a persistent way. This created a sense of connection which parallels some of Susan Phillips work on graffiti and one that I worry that I not only failed to document rigorously when I did see it on UND’s campus, but also sorely miss here at UND.