The New Visitations Regime
The Forest for the Trees
In his formidable text Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James Scott builds a metaphor around nineteenth-century scientific forestry in Germany. Scott explains that early German productivity experts perfected a rational organization of trees that served as the “archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science.” Paradoxically, the experts also succeeded in destroying the forest, a unique and complex ecosystem. Completing the metaphor that underpins the rest of his book, Scott posits that “like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae.” I suppose we are now testing that hypothesis at Exeter, where our own bureaucratic formulae seem to have lost sight of the proverbial forest for the trees. A move to Friday nights has effectively undermined attendance and spirit at Evening Prayer, gym-nights have gone the way of the rotary telephone, and the proliferation of locked doors feels as if the Eye of Sauron has started to cast a long shadow—in total, an emerging theme of lost connections. And now another blow: the new visitations regime. It is short of a coup de grâce, but perhaps less merciful than the status quo.
The Regime's Structure
Students may no longer visit one another’s rooms throughout the day. Exceptions include visits during the hours of 7 to 8 p.m. with permission of the authorizing authority (7 to 9 p.m. for uppers and seniors) or those between residents of the same dorms, spaces organized and categorized by gender. The cogs are neatly confined to their respective spaces, and the hours and policies, including further exceptions I lack the fortitude to detail, are laid out at length in the machine’s manual (e-book). Future improvements will include restricted keycard access (lest a cog accidently wander out of place at the wrong time), auto-locking doors (safety first!), and flow-charts to direct cogs to the appropriate resources in the event of a discontinuity. Perhaps the latter already exists; I find myself joyously confusing reality, fantasy, past, present and future under this new regime. I’ll consider that bewilderment the upshot of Pink Floyd on repeat in my head: “All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.”
Building Barriers
A significant irony arises from the possibility that the new visitations regime may place the heaviest burden on students exploring their gender and sexuality. And I should concede a bias here: I genuinely hope students explore their gender and sexuality, and every nook and cranny of their identity (I’ve certainly tried, both in my youth and in my adult life). Inevitably, that exploration will involve conversations with friends; conversations that are not suited for the Agora or dining halls. Students often need to seek a friend (without regard to a manual's schedule) in a space they both know and simply talk. Any restriction on that process undermines our community. The apologists will respond that an hour or two is plenty of time, the campus abounds with empty rooms, and hours extend on the weekend. But our modern world already isolates (cell phones, computers, etc.) and we should not create further barriers to human connection, even if we include workarounds to ease our collective conscience. Perhaps that explains Andover’s opposing model that opens hours and connections. Sadly, our new regime only adds to the wrong side of the equation, creating a logical inequality that leans toward isolation, toward a bit more decay of a beautiful and recently struggling forest.
A Boarding School
But I have forgotten the righteous, who will speak in the name of fairness and a gender free policy. It is the strongest argument. It comes from a place of genuine caring after all. But it is an argument that has been haphazardly applied in this instance. So much so that our students, at our boarding school, will now have a tougher time visiting a friend’s room in their respective houses than those at a traditional day school. An Abboteer can no longer walk over to a friend’s room, 20 feet away in Soule, on a Saturday afternoon to ponder the view through a looking-glass. Of course, the righteous rarely notice the slide off a slippery slope into Wonderland and will essentially double-down on the argument: our school’s policies and bureaucracy must avoid archaic, gendered conceptions in the name of equity (an ideal I generally support by the way). So I now wonder if our public relations and admissions teams will tout the powerful benefits of this new direction: the brilliant, semantic symmetry in our operations manual, functioning cogs, and our ideals. For what it’s worth, I consider the new regime antithetical to the very idea of a boarding school. I cannot imagine why everyone is leaving home and traveling to this common space, if we are only going to continually push toward living separately.