Now that I get out and about a bit more, I begin to appreciate the extent to which my old employer, Princeton University, has continued to be on the move despite the constraints of the pandemic. We aren’t waiting on any infrastructure bill. Bulldozers everywhere pave the way for new voyages of restless minds or, in some instances, simply pave the way. One of the most profound educational insights ever uttered—usually if uncertainly attributed to Robert Hutchens, Clark Kerr or some other legendary prexy of the last century—involves the disparate priorities of major stakeholder groups within a university. “All the undergraduates are interested in is sex. All the alumni are interested in is football. The faculty are chiefly interested in parking.” You see, there is a reason those people make the big bucks: educational vision.
I joined the faculty here in 1965, and in the years since, and particularly during the years since my retirement in 2006, there are many noticeable signs of expansion: more buildings, more gazillion-dollar machines required by Big Science, more faculty, more programs and research centers, and many more administrators. There is a carefully measured and integrated expansion of the student body underway. I think I have figured out the algorithm behind it. For each additional five students you need one new dean. For each fifty new students you need one new Vice President for Whatever. And of course all these people, and the necessary additional new ancillary staff bobbing in their wake, do need somewhere to park. This is a good news/bad news sort of situation, and of course the two are inextricably entwined. I’ll begin with the good news, because it is just across the street from my house.
A couple of years ago I wrote about what I call Butler Park, several acres immediately across the street and until a few years ago the site of an ancient housing project for graduate students dating from the 1940s. Though all the houses were removed, the grid of streets was left untouched, and can still be found on Google Maps, which have not yet caught up with the university architects. The housing was originally intended for married veterans, and most of the streets were named for top WW2 brass. (Look, e.g., for King Street, Princeton NJ—Ernest King, of course, Chief of Naval Operations—but Devereux, Halsey, or Eisenhower will also get you there). Butler Park is now a great place for a gentle walk, the general vibe being something like walking though a long decayed and romantically overgrown archaeological site or a Claude Lorraine painting.
Meanwhile, the campus parking crisis had become acute. The most dramatic of various steps taken to address it was to construct another multi-storey parking garage. The rub here was that the site chosen for this new building was already a heavily used parking lot. This meant that until new construction was completed there would be a significant net loss of parking spaces available. Sometimes you must be cruel to be kind, but something would have to be done on a temporary basis. And not too far away the old Butler tract still had its grid of war-hero blacktopped streets, admittedly decaying and sprouting weed patches, along which cars had once been parked and along which even more could be parked with a little ingenuity. A couple of weeks of quickie road repair, including the conspicuous delineation of hundreds of parking spots in bright white fresh paint, and the job was done! We couldn’t even mumble, “Not in my back yard,” as it is in our front yards.
Though I used to walk to work
each day, it’s a good half hour walk.
There is no denying that this is remote parking. No status symbol is more potent in the
American university than one’s parking spot, and to be relegated to such an
obscure assignment is instantly to be rendered low man on the totem pole. It is an inconvenience with a tinge of
insult, and the Vice President for Something or Other has done her best to palliate
its impact on staff morale. Very
frequent mini-shuttles speed you to campus from this temporary lot. In the morning hours you never have to wait
more than seven minutes. Even so, seven
whole minutes? Another
vice-presidential brain-wave addresses this problem. Next to the principal shuttle stop the
University has parked for the duration a large, visually conspicuous Food Services
truck under the supervision, during morning hours, of an amiable and
experienced Food Services professional.
You can sweeten your potential seven-minute wait with a cup of coffee
and a pastry (doughnut, cherry Danish, cheese turnover, or bran muffin on some
kind of rota). And it’s free! Future potential is bright, but I have so far
actually used the shuttle only twice. On
most days, however, I have been happy to consume a coffee and Danish, as my
habitual long morning walk ends quite near the food truck. So far as I can tell, no small print
prohibits my initiative. I estimate the
goods and services offered by the Tiger Truck at maybe five bucks, max. And that’s on the inflated scale devised by
Starbucks and Gulf pirates. My most
recent trip on the free shuttle was to get a free flu shot offered by my former
employers followed by a free chocolate donut.
The ease with which these mini-entitlements could buy my approval perhaps
augurs the fate of a pending political package of three trillion in freebies.
That’s the good news such as it is. What, then, is the bad? I fear it is the new parking facility itself. It will not be the ugliest building of the year. Sometimes you have to settle for an honorable mention. But it is huge, brutal, and looming. Many more people than will ever park in it will have to look at it. It will be the landmark of the southeast corner of the campus. This is as it must be. There is no room here for my romantic aesthetics. The University is responding to an urgent need. Form follows function, and the function here is to service our national thralldom to the internal combustion engine. But the parking garage is in a very prominent place. I cannot complain with the philosopher Joni Mitchell that they paved paradise to put up it up. That was done years ago by the folks who built the macadam-surfaced lot from which the new multi-tiered expansion is rising. It is very much to the institution’s credit that its new construction includes no plans for a supplementary pink hotel, though it is perhaps too bad that we have lost the old Fitzrandolph Observatory. But that little edifice was already an eyesore, a decrepit relic of the Little Science of the 1930s. Per aspera ad astra, indeed. I think that’s supposed to mean Through hardships to the stars! Sometimes hardtop has to do.
