Appendix A

“Authority and U: On the Anti-Democratic Campus.”

Original Interchange episode aired September 7, 2021. Edited and aired on WFHB Rewind, August 13, 2025.

INTRODUCTION: On September 7, 2021, WFHB broadcast an episode of Interchange titled ‘Authority and U: On the Anti-Democratic Campus.’ In this episode, host Doug Storm spoke with City Council member Steve Volan about his Master’s thesis, ‘Gownsburg: The Campus as Municipal Phenomenon,’ which explores the paternalistic ideologies of college campuses and how they come into conflict with democracy. This segment presents excerpts from that episode, which is available in full for on-demand listening at WFHB.org. This archived segment from Interchange was repurposed and repackaged by WFHB Volunteer Adriane Pontecorvo.

Steve Volan: I haven't quite been able to articulate how we should rethink terms like the police. I mean, they are a local force that acts with the power of the state, like the city of Bloomington itself. They're enabled to do business through an act of the state. Everything flows from, in this case, the state of Indiana, and we just haven't thought anywhere near enough about it. The phenomenon of IU is a state entity that functions as a local municipality.

Doug Storm: The question of states, obviously, is, you know, one of the reasons we have the difficulties with what we think are conservative or right-wing rule, even when you would say there's liberal or Democratic people in offices, you know, the ways in which the functions of the Congress are sort of always beholden to a minority. They do constrain your lives in more ways than you're aware, I suppose. People talk about the government all the time, but they mean the Fed all the time.

Steve Volan: There's no such thing as government in the singular, that there are governments in the plural. Even within our country, there are multiple levels of government, and they're competing, you know? And that's not a particularly democratic thing, the intragovernment reaction of governments to each other. They're competing for resources, they're competing for attention, they're competing for powers. And the state is sort of like an occupying army. We don't just talk about universities as organizations, we talk about them as places that are self-contained.

Doug Storm: With the publication of Davarian Baldwin's new book, it's called, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities, I wanted to come back to you, Steve, on the topic of ‘Gownsburg,’ because Baldwin also coins a name for the institution he's describing, and calls it ‘universe-city,’ as an all-encompassing, separate entity, right? And you have a similar take on how the university has been created, and how it's evolved to be something of a world apart, a city apart, even as it's in the midst of its host city or town, or has created the host city or town.

Steve Volan: I get into the why and how the university came to be this sort of giant corporate-slash-municipal entity in the first place, and he's talking about the consequences of it. I always wanted to know, why is it that the university could do all these things? You could always say, everything comes down to money, but that's just not the impulse that I was tracing here. The impulse I was tracing was the argument that somehow the state needed to oversee this group of people that they called students, and why they felt the need to oversee them. You know, the term that I focus on is paternalism, that until you recognize the paternalistic impulse in the notion of the campus, it'll be hard to understand why it is that they're doing what they do. Certainly, self-perpetuation is a thing in any organization, there's the impulse to continue doing what you set out to do. But why you set out to do it in the first place often gets lost.

Doug Storm: The life of the student is what's at question here, also. What does it mean to be a student? How do you perceive yourself as a student? How do other people perceive you as a student? You know, what kinds of agency do you have within your locality? You know, what it would mean to care as a student about Bloomington as a city, you know, as an operating entity, as opposed to trying to understand what it means to be a student and have any influence over what IU does.

Steve Volan: You know, you set up an environment that's clearly designed to send the message that students are to be taken care of and that they're not to question how they're taken care of. And then, you know, you wonder why the students don't care, supposedly, about it. I mean, consider that the university is not a democracy, it's an autocracy. It's run by nine trustees, and they have complete authority within the bounds of their geography, and it is absolute here, from within is a state entity that, when it adds land to its so-called campus, takes it off the tax rolls and has no obligation to participate in city processes. They effectively annex from within a city, which is the only exception I can think of to the idea that a city has autonomy, but not when a state university locates itself, and again, because in America, the university, as much a physical place as it is an organization, has this sort of inchoate authority to do whatever it wants.

Doug Storm: It's an arm of the state, more than the city is.

Steve Volan: It's a competing municipality type.

Doug Storm: That has more ability to do what it wants readily, with less bureaucracy and red tape, et cetera. So it has more power than the city has, to be sure. So your study delves into the history of the very notion of the university or school, a space of higher learning. That, you know, you trace to its ‘placeness’ as well. That's what you said earlier, in terms of its geography.

Steve Volan: Right, why did it become a place? I think you can't really separate the idea of the corporate entity known as a university from its physical plant. In other words, I think it draws part of its power from the physical place. You know, it doesn't just own a place. It is an official place recognized by the state that is entirely within the rule of the Board of Trustees. I think there was a passage you really liked in one of my chapters where I talk about the notion of the campus as an anti-city, because it is built by a single entity, and not like a regular city, which is built by a plural society, by many different people, many different entities build the city, even if it has a single government, it's still this interactive dance between hundreds, thousands of people and groups and entities. The whole idea of a campus is that it's a way to isolate yourself from that messy hoi polloi.

Doug Storm: Yeah. It's chapter five, “In Loco Urbis.” To me, it's the whole of the book in a lot of ways. Let's hear it. This is section A of chapter five, “The Campus: Antithesis of the Urban.” “The city and the campus are both populated places. In theory, the ownership of the property in either is shared by all who own property, the public property therein owned by all its citizens. But the city is built by many entities, the campus by one. The city is owned by many entities, the campus by one. The leadership of the city is chosen directly by all who vote. The campus is owned and led by a board of trustees, regents, or visitors, the vast majority of whom are appointed by elected officials in the special, set-aside populated place called a campus that under any other circumstances would be a municipality. No ordinances are passed, no powers are separated, no checks and balances are present. The trustees simply make decisions without meaningful input from the residents, without method for meaningful appeal. The campus is a contiguous portion of land big enough to rival a municipality, but is the opposite of one. It avoids the urban whenever possible and attempts to control urbanity when it cannot avoid it. The campus, in short, is an anti-city.” Perfect.

Steve Volan: That may be the passage that I was trying to write for as long as I thought about this question, why does a college do what it does. To this day, I don't have a quarrel with the second place function of a university as a workplace. I mean, any business, any company, has to have a place to work. You know, even if it's the desk of the founder and nothing else, but there's some place where they work. Or if they have employees, they have to work somewhere. It's when they start getting into the first place and third place functions that—I talk about Oldenburg—that I question, right? So they've always questioned…

Doug Storm: Yeah, go ahead and describe those Oldenburg places so we can talk about that.

Steve Volan: So yeah, Ray Oldenburg postulated that there were three types of places in a post-agricultural society that people needed in their daily lives to function. They needed their first place of home, their second place of work, which, before the Industrial Age, was the same place, the farm, and then the third places, the church hall, the restaurant, the bar, the public places, where people gather.

Doug Storm: Places of communion outside of those other places.

Steve Volan: Right. And that you need all three types of places to lead us a satisfying life. Universities in America are the only entity I know to have managed to sustain, if not do so successfully, single ownership of all three types of places under one aegis. They don't just build workplaces. They build dorms and house thousands or tens of thousands of people, and then they build, you know, third places as well, in an effort to be all things to their charges, who they see as not yet adults. And I've come to question all of that, you know, like I, I think that they're actually pretty bad at building first and third places.

Doug Storm: Compromises their work as second places, also.

Steve Volan: You know, I got questioned at first: Isn’t it ironic that you're biting the hand that feeds you? You're criticizing the place where you're doing your academic work. And I had to say, no, I'm perfectly fine with the university as a second place. There should be places where people can study and study together. I questioned the first and third places. I questioned the parts that have made them effectively independent city states, and why they're doing what they're doing, and is it really successful, and will they be able to continue or to sustain it indefinitely? I think the answer is no.

Doug Storm: Yeah, having to live there and work there and play there.

Steve Volan: You know, a campus is what you get when you let people who are at least invoking utopian ideas, if not ideals. If you let them, this is what they're going to build. Utopia apparently requires a significant amount of authority, you know?