It's been a bumper year for acorns. Each morning, as I walk from car to office along the oak-lined path behind Beardsley Hall, thousands of little nuts cover the ground. I often try to dribble one like a soccer ball, keeping it in front of me until it bounces out of bounds into the grass.
The oaks along my way were planted decades ago astride a road that, until recently, connected College Avenue to Whittier Place. I often tried to park along it on days when I arrived early enough to get one of its shaded spaces, just a few steps from my office in Parrish Hall. After vehicles were banished, I started to walk its pleasant granite-bordered curve, kicking acorns in September, shuffling through late-autumn leaves, pressing my prints in the January snow, and worrying in spring about the patch of lawn that struggles to establish itself on poor construction soil behind Kohlberg Hall.
There's a plan to all of this--a campus is no accident. Knowing how big these oaks would grow, someone marked the distance between the trunks before digging the saplings in. Planners and presidents drew these curves on paper, envisioning Swarthmore as they thought a college should be--with buildings full of intellect and purpose, but also paths and trees and gardens to knit it all together. Our Quaker founders didn't build Parrish at the bottom of the hill. Their vision came with a view--and another, more famous oak-lined path that is everyone's mind's-eye picture of Swarthmore.
How surprising and delightful then are the plans for "The Campus That Never Was". Here we learn that my walk behind Beardsley might have taken me along a sunken football field to a six-story, glass-fronted library. Or that Parrish Hall could have been altered to look like something from Williamsburg--or (heavens!) Williamstown.
We may smile and scratch our heads at these ideas. Yet today's College leaders are planners too, looking forward once again as Swarthmore completes a two-year planning process--one that will likely lead to new buildings as well as new academic initiatives. As we look back at the campus that never was, we have to believe with confidence that our own blueprints for the future will be even better drawn.
Yet the important thing is not the plan itself, but the vision behind it. The unrealized plans of the past amuse us, but they were bold ideas--and, a little like one of those acorns, they were seeds of today's roots and dreams. Those acorns underfoot are intentional--as is, I suspect, my newfound attention to these trees.
--Jeffrey Lott
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