Disturbing the Peace
The tranquil academic life? Not on today’s campus.
By Henry Petroski
One nice spring day I was teaching a class when the usually quiet hallway outside the room erupted in noise. First there was loud discussion among some men, then the sound of a power saw, then hammer pounding, and later the roar of an industrial-size vacuum cleaner.
The racket emanated from the room across the hall, which was undergoing a reconfiguration. What had served as a computer cluster, full of desktop terminals arranged in rigid formation facing a blackboard that was seldom used, had itself fallen into disuse. There was virtually no more demand for the stationary computers on a campus where students had become accustomed to wireless laptops and smartphones. So, the classroom was being reconfigured into a “multipurpose space” where students could relax, study, and collaborate.
The conversion was no doubt prompted in part by the room’s location, which is just inside the main entrance to our oldest engineering building, where prospective students and parents are brought during campus tours. In the previous configuration, the computer cluster was not only technologically out-of-date but also embarrassingly underused.
The renovated room, outfitted with new and comfortable furniture, could be expected to be inviting enough to draw students into it, thereby providing to campus tourists a better impression of our facilities and their value — and the visible engagement of our students. I could imagine a tour guide, standing with her back to the wall of larger windows that was being installed, explaining to a group of visitors how popular this facility is with students.
In the old configuration, the doorway to the room was around the corner, opening off a narrower hallway, which made it awkward for tour groups to gather around the entrance. One of the noisier parts of the renovation occurred when the old doorway was being sealed off and a new one opened up off the front hall. This would make traffic flow more easily for everyone using the building.
It would all be for the better, of course, but in the meantime several weeks of classes had to suffer the noise and dust and dirt. It used to be that small renovation projects like this were done during the intersemester break, when the classrooms were empty and the halls clear. Larger renovation projects were scheduled for the summer months, when classrooms were mostly vacant and alternate ones could easily be found. There seemed to be plenty of time to complete projects in the four months between the end of spring classes and the beginning of fall ones.
Why this eminently sensible schedule has increasingly been deviated from is not clear to me. Perhaps the seemingly constant din around campus of powered lawn mowers, lawn edgers, and grass and leaf blowers has made everyone so accustomed to noise that it is no longer considered an option to teach or study or think without it.
But even if we can get used to and eventually ignore the more or less steady sound of powered grounds-keeping equipment, the intermittent sounds of intrasemester construction taking place across a hallway are definitely disruptive to the lecturing, questioning, discussing, and testing activities that we expect to take place in a relatively quiet environment. It is definitely difficult to concentrate on classroom activities when old drywall is being ripped away, a new doorway is being cut out, and an unpredictable amount of hammering is taking place. Why must loud construction work begin in the spring semester when a ribbon-cutting will not occur until the fall? Let’s go back to a summer-tool schedule for campus construction.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. His most recently published books are An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession and To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure.
Photo by Catherine Petroski