After nearly two years, St. Thomas community members will soon be free of the loud noise, closed roads and unsightly machinery that monopolized South Campus during the construction of the Lee and Penny Anderson Arena.
But when the dust settles on the university’s pricey new sports complex, it’ll also settle on the leafy greens currently being installed alongside it.
The arena’s Kasota limestone walls might house the bulk of the project’s spending — not to mention roughly 5,000 people on a good night — but the demure dandelions and oft-forgotten ferns dotting its exterior have value, too. They form the backbone of the school’s sustainability efforts, and it’s through their influence that the campus’ visual identity branches beyond bricks.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the planting being done next to the new spaces on South Campus; quite the contrary. University construction director John Silva said that much of the new landscaping is designed with a rainwater-recycling irrigation system in mind for more sustainable maintenance, and the design team followed a policy of one-to-one — or better — tree replacement for every tree cut down for the construction of the arena.
Silva said that planting is done with the aim of creating a visually appealing and sustainable outdoor space, with the added caveat that money and maintenance time are both finite resources.
“We try and be as efficient as we can knowing that it all eventually rolls to, ‘Hey, what is that doing to tuition?’ so we try to be efficient with the dollars to make it as beautiful and … maintenance-friendly as possible but still, I think, speaking to the spirit of St. Thomas as a campus,” Silva said.
The university’s plans are far from tone-deaf, either. Silva said that the design team understood the significance of creating a “South Campus quad,” of which the arena was the final puzzle piece. Silva said pedestrian needs were also taken into account in the form of sidewalks that seek to avoid students’ habitual tendency to beeline across lawns.
The grounds and construction teams have almost certainly done the best job possible to create a usable, aesthetically-pleasing outdoor space that treats its landscape with respect.
The real issue lies in what they haven’t done, or can’t; a well thought-out landscape designed on a construction document is still a landscape designed on a construction document, after all. The current space feels impersonal and cold when compared to the vibrancy of other campus spaces like the Pollinator Path gardens or the planting next to Brady Education Center.
The solution? Let the students, faculty and community members who tramp past, around and occasionally over these spaces on the daily make tangible contributions to them.
Macalester University sustainability director Megan Butler told me on a tour around Macalester’s campus that many of the college’s best and most interesting planting experiments were shepherded in — and, in some cases, even planted and maintained — by students.
“Folks really like planting stuff,” Butler said. “It feels satisfying to know that you contributed to this, and you don’t have to do it every time, you can just do it once and feel like you have ownership of the space in a way that you didn’t before.”
Butler said that Mac students have helped plant and maintain a variety of spots around their campus, converting basic turf to biologically diverse planting beds. Student engagement is high in other areas of their outdoor spaces, too; classes often conduct studies and experiments in the campus’ vegetable garden and prairie planting space, and one linguistics professor brought in Anishinaabe storytellers to demonstrate to students the process of cooking down sap from the campus’ own maple trees.
This isn’t to say that St. Thomas doesn’t have or encourage such activities, but when the latest and greatest addition to the school’s vegetative repertoire are some sparse trees and plants installed behind a fence without student input, the idea of the average student seeking permission to implement a small garden for educational purposes sounds about as plausible as asking to take the public safety SUVs out for a Starbucks run.
There’s no grand conspiracy at work to make St. Thomas look boring, but as with most things, the good faith efforts of a handful of individuals can’t always effectively impact a system built for homogenization.
Other facets of campus already display this kind of democratization: very literally, in the case of organizations like Undergraduate Student Government that express community voices on matters of university policy. Endeavors like these look great in university brochures, and a campus landscape designed in part by students’ hands has the benefit of looking as good in person as it does on paper.
University leadership often stresses that a college should be more than a place to extract an education. But when university spaces become pre-ordained, grid-like entities that community members can look at but not touch, it communicates to students that a multi-million dollar check holds more sway than a genuine passion to improve one’s living space.
Butler acknowledged that practical accountability needs to be taken, even in collaborative efforts. She gave the extreme example of when some Macalester students finagled their way into getting chickens on campus, only for the birds to experience poor living conditions due to a lack of accountability and clarity between the students and the university.
It’s true that the bounds of cooperation are limited by the same material resources that dictate landscaping needs currently, but those conversations can’t begin until the university gives students the space to take that responsibility in the first place.
Change, like landscaping, takes some time to mature, and there’s no easy way to improve St. Thomas’ outdoor aesthetics overnight. But not every change has to be a $175 million redwood transplanted in the middle of campus; sometimes it’s enough for us to start the conversation, one blade of grass at a time.
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
