kfitz

Desire Paths

MSU's Linton Hall, a late 19th century red brick building, in the fall, with red leaves falling from the trees

(Note added, 2024-07-20: This post was originally published in 2017 as a test of a new blog I'd set up in my MSU Domains account. I thought I'd moved all the posts there to Planned Obsolescence, and from thence to kfitz.info, but this one somehow got overlooked. I regretted having lost it because it captured something vital about the process of settling in at MSU. I mentioned it in conversation with a now-former grad student of mine the other day and it later occurred to me that I should check the Wayback Machine. And Lo. There's a connection here regarding the obliqueness of the journey, I think.)

The last month has been full of the expected and unexpected business of learning my way around a new institution. It’s been seven years since I’ve been on a campus full time, nearly twenty years since I’ve been centered on a large university campus, and and an unspeakably large number of years since I’ve spent time on a large public land-grant university campus. And so more or less everything I thought I knew about those institutions and how they function is having to be reset. There are new systems, new structures, new acronyms (my word, the acronyms), and new histories and people. There’s a lot to learn.

The geographical component of all that is relatively minor, and yet it’s loomed quite large over my first few weeks. It’s not just a matter of being in a part of the country that I know precious little about (and then the attendant confusions of a cooler-than-expected August and an unusually hot mid-September); it’s also the campus itself. Finding my way from one place to another was initially disorienting, more so than I would have expected. What got me through those early days was the fact that all campus buildings have officially recorded street addresses, with the result that they’re all Google Maps-able by name.

Nonetheless, it took me a while to figure out that there are no straight paths on campus, no way to walk directly from one building to another without a bit of vectoring. All the paths — and there are lots of them — impose slight turns, oblique angles, subtle curves. It’s not your typical quad-based structure, all rectangles and straight lines and diagonals and occasionally cut corners.

It’s the missing cut corners that got my attention; one would think (okay, the recently removed New Yorker in me would think) that folks would get fed up with the indirection of the paths and start forging their way directly from one place to another. But they haven’t. I haven’t spotted desire paths anywhere I’ve been. (Admittedly, my wanderings have thus far been confined to a relatively small area of campus, but it’s pretty highly trafficked.)

There’s something in this I want to ponder, an awareness built into the environment that the best way from one place to another, intellectual-growth-wise, is likely not direct. It requires no end of gradual shifts and turns, of recalculating and setting a course anew. That I have found a place where such indirection is embraced, where shortcuts don’t seem to be the inevitable result, feels faintly miraculous.

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1 Reply

  1. Scholar-at-large Scholar-at-large
    @kfitz I originally thought you meant paths as in career paths; I now see your blog entry treats actually trodden paths. And bonus the circuitous path is applicable to the history of the entry itself. Cool.

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