The Semiotics of Climbing Walls

I'm sure I can't do Barthes-ian justice to this idea, but I've been thinking about the symbolic function of climbing walls in campus recreation centers. This idea came up in conversation with a friend about the proliferation of amenities on campuses, and it follows from the responses to budget cuts that ask why the university spends money on stuff like rec centers while it talks about cutting academic programs.

A scene you encounter over and over again is the campus that was largely a commuter school with minimal amenities finding that the path to financial health requires increased enrollment, and that increasing enrollment seems to require offering a richer on-campus experience. This means more dorms, food court style dining, and always a big rec center. And a ubiquitous feature of these rece centers are the climbing walls, in a prominent place behind a wall of glass. At the school where I teach as an adjunct, I cut through the new campus center all the time, past their climbing wall. Textured material, a faux rock face, extends for a couple of stories, studded with colored protuberances to grab. Reasonably frequently a couple of students are using it.

I'm not a climber, so for the most part the wall is a mystery to me. I don't know what the features are, and I don't understand what kind of exercise experience it is--I know what it feels like to run, ride a bike, play tennis or raquetball, lift weights, what muscles you work. I have it from a good source that climbing is good exercise, but I have to take that on faith.

Even so, a climbing wall always looks cool. The big REI store in Seattle has a huge one that you can see from the road. With all my ignorance of the activity, it still sends out strong signals of a vigorous lifestyle. I feel good and healthy when I see it.

I'm sure the student rec center people will have statistics to disprove this, but I can't help think that relatively few students use the climbing wall and even fewer use it as a signficant source of exercise. But I bet all the students like seeing it.

This is where Roland Barthes would come in handy. It seems to me that the climbing wall in the student rec center is nearly a pure symbol, with just enough functional pretext to justify including it in the building program. So far I'm coming up with pretty mundane interpretations of this symbol and the way it functions in the campus' symbolic order--it indicates that the people here are active and vigorous, not square, rebellious in the socially and commerically acceptable way of Thomas Franks' Culture of Cool. It also invovles an inversion of spaces--the interior of the cultivated, civilized world of the college is occupied by a portion of the natural world, not really untamed but offering an escape from the kinds of activities and structures found in classrooms. Or it shows people training for unintellectual activity in an unintellectual realm, just using simple means to get themselves across an expanse of rock somewhere "out there."

Barthes would have done something a lot more interesting with these climbing walls. I don't think I've gotten to the bottom of the symbolic content, but I do know when I am in the presence of something that exists primarily, overtly and unapologetically as symbol. The physical nature of that wall is pure illusion. It exists in the psychological realm, like a dream or a libidinal urge.

Can the university turn sharply?

In discussing budget cuts at schools in Tennessee, a friend asked why her university was spending money on things like rec centers and other extras while considering cutting academic programs. Of course you can argue about the merits of these additions to the campus, but it's interesting to think about what it would take to make this change in course. It would be a major change of institutional strategy, undoing years of investments on the campus that in this case make it increasingly a full-service residential university.

But one can conceive that such an institution might need to make a major change in direction, rather than keep pursuing a strategy that no longer works. The possibility of this change of direction has to be at least a theoretical possibility. But can you imagine the planning process that would lead to this conclusion? A typical strategic planning process will prescribe pulling together a group of people to work out a new vision. This way you get the benefits of many people thinking through the problem and a shared commitment to the course of action. But in general a process like that will involve a lot of compromises and splitting the difference, with the likely result of ending up close to where you started--the closest thing to consensus will be to stick with what you are doing--at least everyone understands that.

If the planning group goes into a very intense process of group formation and working through ideas together, they might be able to come up with a dramatic new vision as a group. But it is more likely that dramatic ideas will come from individuals. The problem with that is that in addition to the individual creating the idea, they will also "own" it and have the most intense sense of the idea's virtues--selling other people on it is another matter altogether. A theoretical alternative is for one of those individuals, presumably the organization's leader, to impose his or her idea on the organization. You can argue that's what happens in the corporate sector, but higher education governance has little place for that.

It seems to me that you might find the conditions for a group to develop and embrace a radically new idea of the institution when it finds its survival at stake, but I'm not sure how often that happens. I think about Antioch trying to save its residential college in Ohio, or the efforts to save the College of Santa Fe by selling it to Laureate or merging it into the New Mexico public system. Neither of these came together in the end. (While it's probably the end for the College of Santa Fe, I'm betting that Antioch will rise from the ashes.)

If I'm on track about this read on the dynamics for a group considering major changes in direction, it is unlikely that a well-established campus will remake itself until it faces a deep crisis that threatens its survival. A budget cut at a public institution probably doesn't rise to that level.

Is Finance winning?

A few reactions to Arjun Appadurai's commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Higher Education's Coming Leadership Crisis.

In general the article takes aim at the tendencies of universities to "corporatize" themselves. In this piece, he's looking particularly at issues surrounding the leadership of institutions.

His first point involves a prediction that a greater number of leaders will come from outside higher ed and will lack a deep grounding in higher education. I tend to agree with him that movement in this direction would not be good. Not just with Presidents, you can even make the case that CFOs with strong higher ed experience work out better, but I think it all depends on how the person comes into the organization. When I think about CFOs I know, I realize some of the strong ones started out in the corporate world, but have been in higher ed a long time now and come across as fully integrated into this environment. At various levels of the organization, when I hear about business managers without much higher education experience I often want to point out that most of the people on the administrative side of the house had to build their higher ed somewhere at some time.

In a section on management, Appadurai argues the following: "the old tension between full-time administrators and full-time faculty members has become acute, and the balancing act that most presidents perform between their chief financial officers and their chief academic officers has by and large given way to rule by the CFO. As the economy spirals down, the voices of parsimony, thrift, and profit maximization will grow even stronger, and the capacity of academic leaders to shape the agenda of colleges will diminish sharply." There's several things to parse out here.

First, in my experience with Provosts and CFOs, I'm just not seeing "rule by the CFO." Usually, the Provost is the dominant figure. However, it is worth thinking about why Appadurai might see it that way. One explanation is that this reflects his personal experience as Provost at the New School, where he worked with a President from outside academe (Bob Kerrey). But I think there's a more interesting way to look at this.

Focus on the values listed in the last sentence--parsimony, thrift, and profit maximization. Leaving aside that thrift is an enduring value in many institutions (the institutional equivalent of a tweed jacket worn in the sleeves), you can probably make the case that these sorts of economic values may predominate in decisions, even if the Provost or a President with a distinguished academic background is making the decision. I would argue that those values are thrust upon the institution by the fact that universities must operate in the contemporary society and economy, which are dominated by a hyper-charged pervasive market capitalism (to borrow Ed Luttwak's phrase, Turbo-Capitalism). The universities are forced to play by the rules of this climate. It's the same climate that puts tremendous pressure on landowners where I live in Tennessee to exploit every bit of land they hold, getting cash from it in the form of timber harvests or development--it's partly a function of increased costs of living and an increasing need to buy your way into security, higher expectations of luxury, or pressures from taxes as property values rise.

The economic margin of error seems to have tightened in many arenas. There's no reason to think that higher ed would be exempt from these pressures. Even if the Provost retains an appropriately powerful voice, her hand may be forced. Even Presidents with strong records of scholarship will find themselves gaining fluency with bond ratings.

With the current economy, maybe we'll see some easing on this pressure to monetize land. And maybe there's a similar silver lining for higher ed. Otherwise it's hard to say how an individual institution on its own can break out of these structural pressures in the environment.