Reimagining Campus Community: A Spatio-Rhetorical Analysis of Conventional and Unconventional Planning Discourse

ABSTRACT

While urban and suburban planning have received sustained scrutiny from rhetoric scholars in recent years, campus planning remains relatively unexplored. Enacting a framework for analyzing the conventional and unconventional planning discourse swirling around campuses, this article focuses on a specific case: the (in)effective provision of student housing at the University of California Irvine. The analysis juxtaposes formal planning documents tied to the post-WWII origins of UCI with historical and contemporary student-generated discourse to evaluate and exhibit the means by which inhabitants, as rhetoricians-in-residence, can participate in shaping the campus community.

Notes

1. I thank Elise Verzosa Hurley for editorial guidance and support, as well as the two RR reviewers—Jessica Enoch and David Fleming—for feedback that was equal parts rigorous and compassionate. I also want to acknowledge the rhetoric/composition intellectual community at UCI that helped kickstart and refine this project, primarily Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, Daniel M. Gross, Maureen A.J. Fitzsimmons, Jasmine Lee, Lance Langdon, and Allison Dziuba.

2. Featuring articles from participants in the RSA project, the recent issue of Review of Communication (vol. 20, no. 2, 2020) captures the essence of this current wave of spatially mindful and publicly oriented scholarship.

3. While I do not have room in this article to explore the broader history of campus planning, interested readers should consult Coulson, Roberts, and Taylor’s book, as well as Turner’s authoritative history on campus planning in the U.S.

4. Douglass explains that those behind the Master Plan were primarily concerned about economic inequality, as they expected California’s population to remain “largely homogeneous” and, therefore, did not consider race or ethnicity (297). In retrospect, this is a serious oversight. Nonetheless, it reinforces the context out of which the Master Plan emerged: a time when California was dramatically less diverse than it is today.

5. UCI’s location on tribal lands, specifically lands of the Acjachemen and Tongva tribes, has attracted increasing interest in recent years and, in time, might prove to be a significant inflection point for the campus community (see Siddiqi).

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Notes on contributors

Jens Lloyd

Jens Lloyd is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Drew University, where he is also the Director of First-Year Writing. Specializing in spatial approaches to rhetoric/composition theory and pedagogy, he has a particular interest in using archival and ethnographic methods to study the cocurricular dimensions of campus life. His scholarly writing appears in Literacy in Composition Studies, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, as well as in Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, an edited collection from SUNY Press.