Openness vs. security on campus
WE ALL REACT with shock and revulsion at the awful acts of violence that invaded the tranquility of the Virginia Tech campus last week. As a consultant who helped to create the campus plan for Virginia Tech in the 1990s, I was struck at the time by the university's commitment to a permeable, welcoming environment, a vibrant community of learning in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The tragedy is especially unsettling to those of us who have endeavored to uphold the central ideas of openness and engagement on American college campuses. It gives rise to a fundamental question of how far higher education institutions will have to go to provide a secure place without undermining the ideals that are so essential to the learning enterprise.
To address concerns about personal security over the last 30 years, institutions have employed call boxes, security lighting, key card systems, and, inevitably, surveillance cameras. These can be suitable and appropriate measures. But when do seemingly unobtrusive security measures threaten to turn the open, green campuses we all know and love into inward-looking compounds that are hostile to the presumed "outsider" and alienating to student and visitor alike?
College administrators need to be wary of the societal implications of sequestering populations in the name of security. We see the examples all around us -- the trend toward privatized, gated residential communities erodes the quality of our civic lives by limiting free and spontaneous encounters among a wide range of humanity. In much the same way, the proliferation of crudely designed "protections" to courthouses and government buildings coarsens civic life and lessens our shared pride in the public realm.
There is a special poignancy that this horrible event took place at Virginia Tech; its history is emblematic of the best American ideals. The university is one of the 69 land grant institutions that came into being as a result of the Morrill Act of 1862, signed by none other than Abraham Lincoln. It conferred on each state a grant of federal land as an endowment to be used by "at least one college" in the state to "teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts."
The Morrill Act redefined the role and character of American higher education by offering it to a wide swath of the population, not just an aristocratic elite. It spurred a new American curriculum that was, at once, more egalitarian and pragmatic than anything that had prevailed from the time of the colonial colleges. Most important , it codified at the state and national levels the quintessential American philosophy that a skilled, educated population was critical to the development of modern civil society.
Land grant universities like Virginia Tech have a special responsibility to remain true to their egalitarian roots and foster learning within an environment of openness and free human interaction. That role extends beyond the traditional gates of the campus to the localities whose social and economic opportunities are linked more than ever to the resources of higher education institutions.
Town and gown are now inseparable in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. The boundaries must be more seamless, transparent, and, above all, filled with human activity. The safe campus is the one where this activity is robust and visible, where there are "eyes on the quad," to paraphrase the great urban visionary Jane Jacobs.
In their sorrow, students at Virginia Tech demonstrated the power of the bond they share as collegians. No less a Virginian than Thomas Jefferson understood better than anyone the importance of such symbolism.
In the early 1800s, his most profound gesture for the design of the University of Virginia was a great lawn bordered on three sides by buildings, but with the fourth side open to the Blue Ridge mountains. This was an architectural expression of educational enlightenment and a symbolic eschewing of the closed, insular quadrangles that had previously marked English and Continental collegiate design.
American campuses must continue to be microcosms of the open and free societies today's students will some day lead.
M. Perry Chapman is a principal at Sasaki Associates in Watertown. He is the author of the recently published "American Places: In Search of the Twenty-First Century Campus." 
