College seems a life-or-death matter to students, professors, and staff scurrying about campus, but it isn’t. It’s a matter of life.
Every aspect of college and university existence promotes life. On the shelves of the main library, thousands of writers and thinkers and eras past, dead to most of the world, come alive again at a student’s touch. Every semester at registration time, the wealth of possibility, of new beginnings, overwhelms student and teacher alike. Deans may carp about “deadwood,” but the timber stands tall, if inert, in the hallways and faculty club.
At older colleges like Williams, complete with actual graveyard, the sepulchral setting is tucked away from campus consciousness. At universities with a medical school, the “health sciences” campus -- where patients die, where the pale horse pulls up -- is conveniently distant from undergraduates, the better to ignore death’s sting. Even the chief ritual of departure and loss on a campus is called “commencement” -- a venerable triumph of spin that we’d punish as false advertising if attempted by a funeral home or hospital.
That’s why death on a campus, like vulgar sacrilege in church or insipid banter during true life-and-death surgery, strikes with maximum force. Like the names chiseled on hallowed academic buildings, campus life is a commitment to immortality, a promise that the dead shall be raised.
At its most brutal -- in the murder of two Dartmouth professors loved for their generosity to others, the murder of two Gallaudet students slaughtered in their dorm rooms -- death can be an incomprehensible cataclysm exploding the norms of everyday life. When students die, one recalls Erich Fromm’s thought that any death is “poignantly bitter,” but dying “without having lived is unbearable.” At its numbingly accepted yet painful norm, as in the memorial services recently for University of Pennsylvania English professor Lynda Hart, who died of breast cancer at 47, death is comprehended yet privately opposed, silently resisted.
But every death challenges the limitless optimism of the campus. If every institution, as Emerson wrote, is the lengthened shadow of a person, the college or university is a brick-and-marble Emerson himself: a reified fortress of buoyancy, ambition, and looking forward rather than back.
Because no matter who else walks the campus -- the crotchety college president overdue for removal, the midlife-crisis professor rethinking career decisions for the umpteenth time -- the ethos of the campus is that of the 18-to-22-year-old, to whom death is usually and thankfully a stranger.
In 1999, a Bennington College colleague of mine died toward the end of the fall semester. It was a peculiarly awful and ironic death. Tony Carruthers, an artist and professor of video and film studies, suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting on a train in Manhattan, waiting to head back to Vermont. He’d been teaching a course about depictions of death -- Bergman and the like. The last time I spoke with him at the college post office, he’d cheerily invited me to one of his class screenings.
When I returned to campus the day after it happened, I wasn’t sure whether students knew. Within moments, one of my undergraduate advisees saw me and called out, “Carlin, is it true about Tony?”
She came closer and I explained what had happened. She broke into tears and started sobbing, her whole body heaving. I put my arm around her to comfort her. At the same time, I felt awkward -- because I wasn’t crying.
Much as I’d liked my colleague, I didn’t know him very well -- certainly not as well as his students did. More significant, the death of a man over 50 didn’t shock me. People die at that age, and especially off campus. I’d seen lots of people die.
But my student hadn’t. So I stood there, moved by her unabashed grief, sad myself at Tony’s death, yet also uncomfortably detached, clinically conscious that I was comforting her with an embrace though I’d never so much as patted her on the shoulder before.
It was a moment suffused with a sense that something utterly foreign to the campus -- too much reality -- had entered. If troops had suddenly marched past the security gate, the intervention would not have seemed odder.
Whether one experiences such moments personally on campus, or witnesses them in vicarious pain while reading about devastated parents and siblings -- so proud of their loved ones, so suddenly cut off -- you inevitably think, at some point, like an academic.
Is there another side to it? Is there, if not a silver lining, at least the small rationalization that no one gets a pass on life’s horrors, that students, too, must experience fate’s dull-witted cruelty, the vicious crimes of pathological personalities, if they’re to understand life?
Here is where the magic of the campus asserts itself. Because every instinct in one answers, “No.”
“This is not the place, and this is not the time,” you hear yourself whispering to whoever hears such things. Like Wordsworth, we think of the blessedly young child and ask, “What should it know of death?” There will be time enough for murders, and cancers, and hatred.
Admissions offices are powerful, but not powerful enough to keep out death. It crashes in when it will. But the wise men and women of academe are right to offer it no welcome, no nomenclature to encourage it, and only the occasional memorial service. Like the young Emerson, who still wanted to play every part in life even after the death of his beloved young wife, Ellen, the college snaps back after each invasion of its cheerfulness. Its spirit is the spirit of Donne -- that death shall be no more, that death shall die.
Camus wrote that there could be no lasting peace in the hearts of individuals until death is outlawed. On campus, we outlaw it from our minds whenever possible -- knowing it to be the destroyer of worlds -- and rightly so.
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Carlin Romano of the University of Pennsylvania is currently a Visiting Professor of Humanities at Ashoka University in the Young India Fellowship Program. As Critic-at-Large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, he published the essay above, one of several that made him a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, praised by the Pulitzer Board for "bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics." He has given The Edict permission to republish it here.
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