It’s difficult not to be captivated by Yale’s campus, and it’s just as easy to grow numb to it.
The fact that we operate within a grand, Hogwarts-esque gothic wonderland falls to the wayside when we have readings to do, or papers to turn in, or people to meet. Busy periods cause us to be lulled into that ignorance. It’s easy to take for granted the realities around us.
I’ve noticed the details of campus more recently, and it’s been fun. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the trees don’t hide as much of the stonework. Maybe I’m more bored.
Among the things I’ve noticed are empty niches.
They’re little alcoves in the sides of buildings and above doorways. Sterling has them, so does HQ. Every college in the center of campus — Branford, Saybrook, Trumbull, Berkeley and Grace Hopper — have them. WLH, too. Yale’s campus design finds its roots in Christian architecture, and Yale itself was founded as a school for ministers. Yale has different, less directly Christian emphases today, but it’s impossible to escape the imagery: Sterling is laid out in cruciform, as is Payne Whitney. Saybrook’s Wrexham Tower is a copy of the tower on St. Giles’ Church in Wales, where Elihu Yale is buried. Art all around campus is directly influenced by ecclesiastical iconography — and the ones here deify education rather than Christianity. Religious influence is woven into the brick and mortar of Yale’s campus, only with knowledge taking the place of Christian figures.
Yale’s temple-complex of knowledge is similar in many ways to the grand churches of Europe, although you won’t find many empty niches in the walls in Gothic cathedrals. In a church, there’s almost always some stone statue taking up that space: a Mary, a saint, Jesus.
That is the purpose of the niche: to showcase some venerable symbol. And the ones at Yale are empty, with very few exceptions. I don’t think this is an accident. But why? I have a few suggestions.
David Foster Wallace said in his oft-quoted commencement address, “This is Water”: “There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” I happen to agree with him. If you don’t, that’s fine. Bear with me for a moment. If we allow Wallace and the Abrahamic religions to back us into that corner, those empty niches and pedestals are suddenly full of meaning: it’s our job as the viewer to put something where there’s nothing. Our job as students becomes to generate some object of desire and to venerate it because we’re hardwired to. Like the Athenians in St. Paul’s missionary journey, these pedestals are invisibly inscribed, “to an unknown god,” and it’s our work to create deities — or at least define what they are. Good grades? Connections? Sports? A religious deity? Whatever we put in the niche governs the way we operate during our time in college and far beyond that.
If you’d rather reject the notion that we all must worship and that there are no non-worshippers, that’s alright. You can ignore the previous paragraph if you want to.
It doesn’t change the fact of the empty niches and the questions they ask. Outside of the questions about one’s belief and worship, perhaps they have something to say about Yale as an institution. Maybe they suggest that Yale stands for nothing in particular. That the virtues, principles or saints that could be venerated are constantly shifting, and that carving one out of stone would be a waste because another idol would soon take its place as popular opinions shift. It wouldn’t be marketable for Yale to claim any objects of veneration outside of its generic “light and truth” — so it hasn’t claimed any, and it probably won’t.
More optimistically, maybe it’s a little bit of both: Yale is a place that ostensibly creates an environment in which a person can accomplish whatever it is they value most, a university in which one spends four years chipping away at their respective stone blocks — in the end coming up with a final product that matches the niche-figure they envisioned all along. It’s a place where empty niches are not only challenges but opportunities.
Then again, maybe the empty niches mean nothing at all. Maybe I’m committing a classic error here: creating meaning out of a text where there is none, projecting my inward thoughts onto something else instead of expressing them unprompted. Then again, perhaps they were left empty to generate discussions like these. If that were the case, it worked. I think a lot of us could shake hands over the fact that there are less exciting, less intricate, and less thought-provoking places to take walks than Yale’s campus.
MITCHELL TYLER is a junior in Grace Hopper College. He can be reached at mitchell.tyler@yale.edu