The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
the college provided, but most modern students don’t. Instead, Jo and Joe College make over what the college provides by bringing in carpets, futons, beanbag chairs, lamps, electronics, curtains, comforters, and other lifestyle accessories, each creating “my space” in one of the identical rooms in a dorm corridor. In this consumer individualism, our choices reflect who we are (or who we’d like to be), but they also reflect our desire to fit in. The marketing consultants at Teenage Research Unlimited call the process “indi-filiation,” a magical mix of individualism and affiliation that lets us express our uniqueness—just like everybody else.7
Although it’s ultimately individual, off-to-college spending begins as a family affair: Advertisers tell parents that a spending splurge is the best way to express their love and mark this important rite of passage. “This is one of the largest emotional transitions people ever make,” says consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow, “and shopping is a way to reduce anxiety. People feel in control when they’re shopping. It’s something we do really well as Americans.” As a result, parents who are about to become empty nesters try hard to fill up the new nests of their offspring.8
There’s much more to this marketing effort than a single season’s sales. As Tracy Mullin of the National Retail Federation explains: “Retailers are hoping to not only boost this year’s sales but also to gain customers for life.” Marketers know that college students are in a position to establish lifelong brand loyalties for a new set of products. Even though current students already wield billions of dollars of discretionary spending annually in the United States, graduates will spend a lot more in the future. Student consumers are also early adopters of new technologies and artifacts—so marketers know that the latest items in today’s dorm rooms will be the standard stuff in tomorrow’s homes, apartments, and condos. In this way, college students foreshadow the materialism of the future.9
Whether or not students purchase anything at Best Buy, IKEA, Amazon, or Wal-Mart, the efforts of marketing departments shape the expectations of college consumers. Before they even get to classes, everyone learns that college is not a place apart, a reflective retreat from the everyday world—it’s just another market niche with its own consumer choices. Advertisements teach “ensemble thinking,” the idea that all of our things together should express a clear message about taste and values, as well as the art of comparison shopping—not comparing items to get a good price, but comparing our consumption to those immediately around us. Instead of going to college to “find themselves,” students seem to be going to school to express themselves with stuff.10,11
For the past several years, I’ve asked students in my Campus Ecology class to audit their rooms, compiling lists of all their belongings. One such list, reproduced verbatim, includes:
The quantity of commodities in the average college dorm room today is radically different from one hundred years ago. In those days a student might have three or four changes of clothes, and two or three pairs of shoes. Students took the train to college instead of arriving in cars, trucks, and vans pulling U-Haul trailers. The amount of stuff was limited, more or less, by what you could carry—or what you could fit into a steamer trunk. Furnishings were Spartan, both by necessity but also by choice: College was a place where—freed from the clutter of the material world—a student might think clearly about the purposes of life. And surprisingly enough, many of them survived their studies without lofted beds, designer lighting, or shag carpets.
All the stuff in dorm rooms today is a testament to the social construction of necessity. In a prescient 1962 essay titled “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket,” poet Randall Jarrell identified the shifting nature of necessity:
As we look at the television set, listen to the radio, read the magazines, the frontier of necessity is always being pushed forward. The Medium shows us what our new needs are—how often, without it, we should not have known!—and it shows us how they can be satisfied: they can be satisfied by buying something. The act of buying something is at the root of our world; if anyone wishes to paint the genesis of things in our society, he will paint a picture of God holding out to Adam a check-book or credit card.
Because marketers and manufacturers need us to need, they work hard to create new necessities both in college and American life, “upscaling” yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities. And so the “buyosphere” expands over time, but the biosphere, by nature, does not—and that’s a problem.12
The Landscape of a Dorm Room
Jo and Joe College never think about it this way, but a dorm room is a natural landscape. It’s not sublime, like the Rocky Mountains or the pounding ocean surf. It’s not picturesque, like the winding paths in parks or the rocky outcrops on the most attractive college campuses. But it is an environment, the habitat where students spend a large part of college life. Like a landscape painting, it’s also a cultural composition of nature, revealing the relationships of people to the natural world. In this landscape, we can see how people shape nature for their own ends, including aesthetic aspirations. To some extent dorm rooms are a museum of college life: Each of the artifacts on display has a story to tell, and all of the stories together add up to college culture.13
Biosphere and Buyosphere
| Biosphere: Sphere of Life | Buyosphere: Sphere of Commercial Life |
|---|---|
| Ecosystems | Eco(nomic)systems |
| Ecosystem services | Business services, consumer services |
| Inhabitants | Consumers |
| Organisms | Organizations |
| Photosynthesis | Faux syntheses, chemical concoctions |
| Plants and animals in habitats | Habits in a habitat of consumption |
| Resource flows | Resource extraction |
| Gift economy | Market economy |
| A small world, after all | A mall world, after all |
| Environments intact | Environmental impacts |
| Evolution, natural selection | Fashion, cultural selection |
| Life | “The good life” |
| Natural cycles | “Progress” |
| Waste=food | Waste=waste |
| Commodious | Commodified |
| Solar-powered | Fossil-fueled |
| Self-sustaining | Unsustainable |
|
The biosphere is the thin and |