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We began this week's discussion by describing the various ways "we locate Bryn Mawr": as a city on the hill, near the train station, by memory, in a suburb near Philadelphia, in an enclave outside the city, in relation to our homes and the "other campus," in comparison to the status of other small liberal arts colleges in the country, in a great public school district, in an area with a boring history (and a dull present?), "at the end of the sidewalk" (it's "a deathtrap for pedestrians"!). Then we compared our own descriptions with those locations provided on the internet by services such as AAA: "mid-Atlantic states," "middle states," and the "northeast section" of the country. It was noted that we are an "uncompassed campus"; that is, none of the buildings are orientated towards the directional markers of north, south, east or west.

Zeroing in, we were then asked what associations we had for four specific buildings on campus: Taylor, Ward, Guild and Wyndham. These buildings "cover the campus," geographically, and represent the range of services offered here--administration, facilities, computer access and hospitality. Our associations evoked many other dimensions of campus life, including some of the tensions between "being seen from the outside, and how it feels on the inside." Looking @ "how we felt" when we entered each building evoked the full spectrum of power and hierarchy that operates on this campus. Our discomfort with being served in one location, compared with our comfort in asking for service in another, revealed something about how each of us thinks we "know our place" on campus. When can we ask others for their expertise, and when do we hesitate to do so, thinking that we should be able to handle the problem ourselves?

Where do we feel most uncomfortable? In which of these buildings do we ask ourselves, "what do I do next?" In which of them has "the building been replaced by relationships"? When "what goes on in the building is working," that work may actually be invisible to us. But sometimes our assigned roles get blurred. This may be a good thing, part of a healthy re-envisioning of ourselves as a community. But then who is really the administration here? Who is serving whom? When are we paying, in real costs or a social price, for that service? What might it mean to be a facilitator who can bring different sorts of people together in these spaces?

How much does our origin determine how we see the campus? Do we assume that others see it the way we do, or do we assume that we all come from different worlds? Our accents are another way we locate one another, not just geographically, but in terms of race and class; academics often distinguish themselves by the "lack of accent." How might we re-draw the "conceptual maps" each of us has of the campus?

The conversation concluded with a cool visual representation of the space where we were meeting, Dalton 212, seen from a variety of increasingly-distant levels: in the building, on campus, in the township, in the state, in the region, in the country, on the globe, in the universe. How might we use these aides to re-envision this space, to recreate the campus as one where we might all be comfortable, and make others comfortable as well?