The Scarlet it Black, May 4. met—page a

An Imaginative glimpse ahead

" 2001: a Grinnell guided tour

by David J. L. Blatt

it was a pleasantly warm spring day in
March. 2001, on the campus of Grinnell,
about the time when Spring Fever strikes
students in mid-semester doldrums and
prospective Students come to Visit. On this
particular day. tour guide Adama Cart-
wright, ’02, was giving the standard ad-
missions tour to Starbuck Schultz, son of
Andrew Schultz, '80 tand Gregg Edwards,
also '30) Green leaves were beginning to
appear and several students in electric
lawn tractors were sweeping the debris of
the [all and winter from the green carpet
of central campus.

"THAT LOW. slant»rooied building
there,” pointed out Adama, beginning his
spiel, ”is the Voertman library, It has
solar panels all along the south side, but
you can’t r ,9 them from here,”

“The wt .Ile library is in there?" asked
Starbuck incredulously. .

"OH. NO, THAT'S not the whole
building. Most of it‘s underground. The
part you can see from here is just the
skylight,"

“I‘ve never seen an underground
building like that before."

“YEAH. WELL, IT was one of the first
ones they built in the 90's, when the
energyrefflcient building boom was going
full-blast There's an interesting story
behind that place: it was named for 3
Humor professor here, in the economics
department I think, who was supposed to
have predicted an energy shortage even
before '73, but nobody would listen to him
{or years "

“Huh.” said Stai‘buck, “I don't
remember my father mentioning him off-
hand. but I’ve always heard ot people like
that though I've never really known about
any of them Really iarsiglited. I guess"

“WELL, THAT'S not what theythollgt‘l
at the lime. obviouslyl" replied :\U‘rl|l’til
“Well, anvway, all throughout, the
:70's and oven the '80's, the Ad»
ministration and the Trustees really didn't
do much of anything to make the campus
eco-sound. ()1' course, they tried all sorts of
technical lixes. Insulation, thermostals,
and whatnotl but no really lundamental
changes. Can't really blame them I guess,
since nobody else was doing anything
either, but Grinnell is supposed to have a
reputation for innovation . ,

“And they changed their policy in the
90's?” queried Starbuck, trying to be
helpful and sound Intelligent

“DID THEY EVER!” said Adama,
shaking his head. “I wasn‘t around then. of
course, but you hear all these stories about
the, 90's lhat make it sound like all hell
must have broken loose I'm sure it did.
though, considering what was happening

PUB CLUB

out there in the ‘real world} Well. when the
campus agitation 'began', the story
goes. the Administration got Soft Paths
Religion and just went crazy. They were
going to tear down or modin every
building on campus, rearrange the
calendar overnight, recycle everything,
install solar-paneled blackboards. and that
kind of thing."

“The first thing they did was to rip down
the old library in the space of a summer,
they just smacked it. The old one was a big
twostory glass box, looked hideous from
pictures you see of it, and I guess it was
kind of a white elephant, Evervbodv used
to complain about it, supposedly; it was
either too cold or too hot. it wasn’t big
enough, and it was gradually sinking into
the ground, Well, that gaye them an idea,
so they ripped out the old one, dug a huge
hole. built a new library in it,\and named it
for this guy Voertman, thereby redeeming
the college,”

farms by then, too, so we were saved
almost by land values alone.

“This is just a general impression,”
Starbuck said tentatively, “but it seems to
me that the whole atmosphere here is kind
of lowrkey and laid-back. Everybody
seems so inward-looking and concemed
with their own problems.”

"N0 WILD ACTIVISM or campus
radicals you mean," said Adama. “People
are still socially concerned here, probably
more so than other places, but you can still
see this ‘conservative trend' that
everybody keeps talking about,”

“Do you think mat is good, or?!"

“WELL. l DON’T knowni replied
Adama, anticipating the question. “Some
incredible things went on here in the 90’s,
and serious academic work was kind of
neglected, but there was a sort of in-
tellectual and moral uphmval that must
have been fascinating. I don't know if I
would have wanted to go to school then, but

. . the,college is self-sufﬁcient

in energy and food . .

“DID THEY REALLY tuck it up or
something“ asked Starbuck.

“Well no. actually the library was one of
the more successful building projects the
school carried out in the 90’s”, Adamo
explained, “They have a little problem
with water seepage. but basically the
library lived up to expectations; it heats
and Cools itself and is a reasonably
pleasant place,

TIIE PEC WAS the real tiascwthat's
the physical education building. its that
long. low thing up lherc. but nobody who
saw it then would recognize it now. They
tried to insert a second floor somehow.
and expand thc toundation, and load the
roof with solar panels which were lacing
the wrong direction, and any number of
Rube Goldberg schemes, I'm not exactly
clear on what they did, but one day the
root just tell in and thcy had to totally redo
the place, fortunately with better plan-
lung.

“This happened about the same time as
lhcy were planning to tear down mostoi
the dorms, so I guess it taught them a
lesson and made them stop and look at
things first "

“THEY MUST'VE been running out of’

money then, too," Starbuck commented.

“Yeah, right A lot of our endowment
was in bluechip stocks and high-
technology stuff, so the college nearly lost
its shirt in the Second Great Depression.
rjortunately, we had acquired several

I'll bct this was a hell or an exciting place
ten years ago."

“What do they burn most at the time
now“

"0". I'IIE HEATING plant, down there,
has a couple fluidizedsbed boilers, so it
burns just about anythingigarbage.
wood, coal. biomass stuff Of Course most
of the biomass they just use on the farms
or make it into methanol and sell it "

"And they really haven't changed much
in those old dorms" I hear one's been
around since 1893 or something." Said
Starbuck apprehensively,

"Oil. DON'T WORRY. my man," chided
Ad' Id. “ the old places have character.
besides. they stopped tcaring (lown things
and putting up new buildings since the
PEC affalrmit's pretty stupid not to use
something that you already have You can
generally find something to do with most
anything, even that monstrosity over
there.“

“What's that?"

"THAT IS.» 60’s anachronism known as
the Forum, It used to be like the student
center. but now they use it tor an art
gallery anda greenhouse. Most of it is only
open in the summer, since its so hard to
heat It's amazing to think people built
glass cages like that and pumped energy in
to keep them at seventy degrees all the
time. Iwonder when they discovered there
are four seasons.”

“will they open it when Summer Term
starts?” asked Starbuck.

“THAT'S RIGHT. I won’t be around
then, though, I’m going to spend the
summer on one of the college’s iarms in
Nevada, Iowa. It's the one farthest away
from here, but it's our only tullrscale live
stock ranch, the Ponderosa,”

“Do many of the students work on ﬁre
farms?”

"I‘D SAY ABOUT a quarter of them
work on a farm at one time or another.
More oi them would, except that we get so
many suburban and city kids who have
never seen anything bigger than a
basement mushroom patch and flee at the
sight or a cow. A lot of them just stay on
campus through all three terms and fulfill
their work requirements part-time there.”

"HOW no you go about getting a job71
guess I’m not quite clear on the workstudy
arrangement," said Starbuck,

“Well, the scheme itself is pretty much
your basic Berea Plan like the college in
Kentucky. You have a list or job openings
to choose from and are given a number of
academic and work credit requirements
you have to meet to graduate, plus a pay
scale based on your financial aid. Other
than that. it’s pretty much up to you and
the student Committees that run each
enterprise, We have a generally liberal
and cooperative atmosphere here, not like
some places which are like Fascist labor
camps,"

“TIIA’I S ONE reason why I‘m looking
at Grilinell,‘Y said Starbuck, “Your
program impressed me much more than
Cal‘leton's or Stanford‘s "

“Yeah. I guess it works pretty well,"
agreed Adama. “One of the things Ada
missions Stresses is that the college is self
suIIicient in energy and food and that most
of the enterprises actually turn a pmiit
Tile college as a whole doesn't make
money, of coursc. and there are still a lot
oi bugs in the system which everybody
complains about. but when you get right
down to it no oncwauts to change the work-
study plan "

ELECTRICITY TURNED OUT to be no
problem at all—the school is tied in with
the town's power grid, which gets most or
it's Juice irom the wind mill banks north of
town. Also. the physics department or
somebody is always experimenting with
photovoltaic cells and things like that, not
to mention the steam power from
cergeneration.”

The HESPERIS INSTITUTE
for HUMANISTIC STUDIES

August Session
to August l7th,

Monday-Thursday 4:t)0 p.m. —'I:15 «.m.
friday 4:00 p.m.—l:45 mm.
Saturday—6:30 p.m.—l:45 «.m.

HAPPY noun (:3

4 p.m.-6:30 pm:
Patrons must be 18 yrs. old before July 1, 197B

ew‘mo

July 23rd 1979

The Senior Fellows of the Hesperis Institute announce the following
program'tdr the August Session 0 1979:

Longimlr, 071 [he Sublimg

(reading: in Greek) Arieli and Crown:

Messrs.

- sdscosgsann as {ﬁts
dos caseload fAfddox‘bm

33$"34?

Delivery Available
236-6479

Mom—Friday 7 u.m.—9 pm.
5 ~ Saturday!) ll._llI.—9_ NIT.

Thoma: Aquimzr' Doctrine of Creation

(reading: in Latin)‘ Mr, Baldlier

g

93!] 5356A? Ancient Biology: Alix/axle and Galen Mr. Canal!

Mrs. Crosser:

Studies in Seventeenth Century Poetry

Studies in Pluto's Ethic: Mr. Germ”

' For further information, see Professor Kintner or write to The Hesperis Institute, Box 88,
Mount Vernon, Iowa 52314. The Institute will provide housing at reasonable rates.

_3'°m-

 

” ﬂuidity. tor-n

