This Saturday brings us a long-awaited dose of brightness and relative warmth; rarely do I let a day like this go by without a stop at my spot on the bridge. The bricks are chilly against the bottoms of my feet, but the sun grins above. Conditions are perfect for precisely the things that are happening: a track meet bringing students from all over the country to our campus, and a flurry of tours for prospective families. From my lakeside perch, I overhear conversations from the endless stream of runners breezing by and from bright-eyed applicants evaluating a potential new home. And they almost invariably center around our campus’s leafy aesthetic, particularly the lake.
Struck by the almost all-consuming role natural features are playing into these first impressions of our campus, I’ve been thinking back to my own initial encounter with UR. I was here for a tour with my parents over the summer, and with the student body decimated a visual impression was pretty much the only one I could come away with. The lake and the trees still stick out in my memory as essential elements of my notion of Richmond—this, of all the schools I visited, was the place in which I could feel I existed in an ecological space, part of both a natural habitat and the fabric of a city. When I visited again right around this time of year, I was even further won over by the daffodils, spring bursting around every corner.
It’s disappointing to consider the ways my experience here hasn’t measured up to that first impression. Richmond manicures itself to a tee, but the more I’ve learned about the campus’s relationship with its watershed and the real ecological forces at work here, the more I realize needs to be done in order for UR to match up to the impression visitors come away with. I still love the daffodils (though I’ve learned I don’t get along with the pollen that accompanies them), but I hope my time at UR will involve a tangible shift in the authenticity of its nature-friendly image. And I hope especially that the projects our class is embarking on will contribute to that effort!