Dreaming spires and concrete halls

Dreaming Spires and Concrete Halls: The Poetics of Place from Oxford to Simon Fraser University
essay by Scott Gibson

*

I arrived late, getting off the bus from Heathrow in an unfamiliar place and in a seemingly unfamiliar time.  It was Tolkien’s Oxford, not merely the city of dreaming spiresbut Oxenaforda, the ford of oxen, the place where words and waters had mingled for a thousand years.  The name itself felt older than the stones of the buildings I passed, an echo of that noble philologist’s delight in language, a word that in its wielding carried the memory of work and water and wayfaring.

I had stepped out of my own days into something different and complex; a city where time existed in layered chronoclines and where people gathered in eddies.  The pavement hummed with a strange dual current, one of deep history and deeper knowledge running unseen through the stone and mist.  Another river, a newer one; bright, digital, electric, flowed beneath the cobblestones like some gothic tributary of light.  Overlapping worlds of past and future existed simultaneously atop one another and their joining created a turbulence in the mind.  Oxford was alive in layers; medieval and modern, analog and algorithmic, and I walked with awe over the surface of its entangled streams.

It was midnight when I arrived, and the hour lent the place uncertain shadows, reflecting my mood as I attempted to find my bearings.  At Gloucester Green, the marketplace lay open to the wind, its empty stalls vaguely threatening in the darkness.  Shadows pooled beneath the iron frames, and laughter from nearby pubs spilled through the narrow lanes.  The air smelled of rain and beer and ancient brick.  I crossed through the darkness, emerging onto a loud, crowded street.  Around streams of students and other pub-goers flowing from doorways, I found my way north on Banbury Road beneath a star-scattered sky.  The streetlamps, veiled by mist, brightened my mood, appearing as monastery candles guiding my way.  At last I came to Cotswold Lodge, feeling less like a traveler checking into a modern hotel and more like a wanderer from a tale arriving at an inn near Tolkien’s Shire after completing a first adventure.

Morning brought the light that revealed the formof the city.  I had arrived ahead of most of my class, a cohort of Simon Fraser University students in the Graduate Liberal Studies program.  We were enrolled in a travel study course taking us from Vancouver to Oxford to examine the role of life writing at this venerable school.  I took the opportunity to explore on my own and the city spread out before me like a palimpsest, its histories and modernities written over one another, with each visible alongside the next.  I walked south, guided by internet-linked cartography, moving past Kellogg College and Wycliffe Hall.  My path took me across from the modern Clarendon Laboratory and then by the neo-Gothic Keble College. 

As I walked I reflected on John Ruskin’s idea in The Seven Lamps of Architecture that “architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations” and that they “embodied their moral history, for the delight, the instruction, and the service of their successors.” Viewed through that lens, Oxford became a constellation of moral designs, each built with an intention toward a specific practice of learning.  Lodge and library, chapel and cloister, along with the quadrangle and dining hall; these are the fundamental structures of Oxford Colleges and each are more than a physical space.  They act as vessels for a set of ideas about what knowledge should be, and how it should be acquired. 

As I walked among them, I considered their power and the element of the sublime in standing before such antiquity, feeling the pull of history as you cross the threshold, yielding to its weight. What I wanted to know better was how a place transmits its morality to its inhabitants, influencing the experience and outcomes of learning. 

Later, after reciting the traditional induction ceremony in which we pledged neither to remove a book from the Bodleian, nor bring any flame inside, I stood at the entrance to the Special Collections area at the Weston Library.  Prior to leaving for Oxford I had written to the Tolkien Archivist requesting access to his unpublished materials and was granted access, yet even with that approval in hand I was stunned to find myself on the threshold of something so few ever see.  It felt like a liminal moment, a counterpart to The Fellowship standing before the West-Gate of Moria.  At the Weston threshold I couldn’t help but whisper mellon, the elvish word for ‘friend’ under my breath as I used my library card and the automatic door swung open to grant entrance.  Vast wealth awaited me inside, but instead of gold and mithril, it was access to Tolkien’s Special Collections repository that I would be seeking.

The question of architecture’s influence on the act of learning stayed with me as I later sat working in the Bodleian Library special collections area, and was amplified further when I visited the Duke Humphries Library.  The vaulted reading rooms felt more like sanctuaries than workspaces.  Every sense was sparked through the ribbed and illustrated ceilings, the deliberate stillness, the smell of paper and stone; these sensations insisted that scholarship is not a form of production but one of reverence.  The space itself was shaping my intellectual posture and I found that within this architecture, the act of reading became devotional.

These experiences sharpened my focus on Ruskin’s core proposition that architecture, at its most fundamental, is the materialization of intentionality.  Ruskin tied building design and morality together when he wrote: “Architecture never could flourish except when it was subjected to a national law as strict and as minutely authoritative as the laws which regulate religion, policy, and social relations.” Ruskin also noted this moral intention in writing “the architecture of a nation is great only when it is as universal and as established as its language…the work shall be that of a school, that no individual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary, accepted types and customary decoration.” Through Ruskin’s ideas we see that architectural forms are not merely structures but are moral premises with claims about what a community values rendered in the materials of the builder be they stone, glass, or concrete. 

How then are we to understand the form of the University?  Oxford’s oldest scholastic building designs reflect the forms originally instantiated in the church or monastic cloister.  By these elder colleges taking a sacred form, they gesture toward the idea that the learning taking place within has a purpose that elevates one toward the holy.  We see a stark contrast between the buildings of an Oxford college and the unadorned, box-like design of a mass production factory.  Both the Academy and a factory are part of systems of production, where one develops knowledge and the other manufactures marketable items.  It is the architecture of Oxford that informs its inhabitants that what is being produced has meaning, and requires reflection, where a factory is nearly always plain, utilitarian, and basically made because its aims are efficiency, replication, and profit.

This difference between design approaches is not simply economic, but ethical.  Both J. R. R. Tolkien and Ruskin had deep concerns about the morality of the industrial era.  This line, from Ruskin’s collection of essays The Stones of Venice, became one of his most quoted ideas: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.  You cannot make both.” Ethical production for Ruskin was the act of the artisan, the individual expression of the human will that could not be mass produced and one that celebrated imperfection instead of vilifying it.  By Oxford’s eldest colleges taking the form of a church, there is an implication that the production undertaken within is of a sacred nature, and that both the individual and their study is worthy. 

Tolkien’s hostility toward industrialization was well documented and he shows its destructive aspects through the stories of The Shire and Isengard in The Lord of the Rings.  By describing in detail the connection to nature and the simple, traditional life of the inhabitants of these places, Tolkien sought to produce a horror in the reader at the fate they would endure once the forces of Mordor arrived.  Sauron’s armies, led by Saruman, would burn the trees and strip the land in order to produce the vehicles of war.  This disrespect for the sanctity of nature and the old ways could be overcome as was shown when both the Hobbits of The Shire and the Ents of Fangorn fought back, defeating Sauron’s forces.  In The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, he expressed his fear the University was being similarly hollowed out when he wrote to his son Michael in 1963:

Years before I had rejected as disgusting cynicism by an old vulgarian the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright. ‘What do you take Oxford for, lad?’ ‘A university, a place of learning.’ ‘Nay, lad, it’s a factory! And what’s it making? I’ll tell you. It’s making fees. Get that in your head, and you’ll begin to understand what goes on.

Tolkien feared the move from seeing value of the thing in itself to valuing a thing for its utility.  The nature of the countryside of Oxford and the nature of the student and teacher in their cloisters were being used to serve production, profit, and economic progress instead of those aims being a positive outcome of a more noble pursuit.  By using these things for ends outside of themselves they were made tools of, as Ruskin had forewarned.

Similarly, the modern University is under threat by a changing focus away from a celebration of the Liberal Arts toward a disproportionate emphasis on the hard sciences due to perceptions around return on investment.  Across the world we see reductions in budgets for Liberal Arts and an increase in rhetoric that questions what economic value there is in these programs.  This is the destruction of The Shire again before us; the development of the individual into a tool for economic production instead of a cultivation of what makes us uniquely human.  The digitalization of education has introduced the logic of efficiency into learning itself, where speed and scale threaten the slower virtues of contemplation and care.  The question then is whether the moral architecture that once defined places like Oxford can survive this transformation and if so, what shape it might take in a digital world.

On leaving the library and walking once more among the Colleges, I reflected on the idea that where Oxford’s architecture illuminates the sanctity of knowledge production, there is yet a darker side of what it conveys.  While the cloister protected the scholar from the noise and distraction of the outside world, it also could isolate and separate.  The criticism of Oxford as a place apart from the world is often heard when the “dreaming spires” quote is used with disdain.  The power dynamics of the religious institutions also comes into play as hierarchy, tradition, and ritual are a transmitted language through the architecture of old Oxford. 

I arrived at Exeter College, the place where Tolkien had studied for his undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature.  Opening the huge, castle-gate doors, I was barred from entry by an electronically controlled gate and a sign forebodingly announcing the college was off limits to visitors.  Learning there was no access to the public at the time, I spoke to the castellan who sat behind a glass divider.  Explaining I was a visiting scholar inquiring about possibly seeing the grounds, I was pleased to find that my Bodleian library card was the talisman that identified me as an insider, and I was granted access.

The grounds of Exeter were a marvel.  Seeing the place Tolkien had spent a good portion of his early Oxford years was thrilling, yet as I walked the idea of the contained nature of Oxford colleges stayed with me.  Moving through the gardens I could see the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, yet was denied a full view of it due to the high walls.  There was both a sense of safety and separation, of elevation and enclosure.  The exclusivity built into the architecture must surely have cast a shadow on the learning and thought of those who attended here.  The gates that mark each college entrance are portals to another order of time, where silence and tradition reign.  Yet those same gates also symbolize exclusion of class, of gender, of access to learning.  The closed gate that preserves the cloister’s silence also keeps others out and to walk through those gates as an outsider, even temporarily, made me feel both the privilege of being accepted and the alienation of those denied entry.  As pleased as I was to have been allowed inside Tolkien’s world, I realized that access is not the same as belonging; I was permitted in, but was not really part of it.

The paradox between the nurturing and constraint of thought, as well as the porous nature of access, runs through the moral history of the University.  The medieval studium generale evolved from ecclesiastical roots with its quadrangles echoing the cloistered monastery.  As Walter Rüegg observes in A History of the University in Europe, the University is “the only European institution which has preserved its fundamental patterns and its basic social role and functions over the course of history.” This endurance gives the university its moral weight yet the persistence of its form also reveals the tension between scholarly independence and accessibility.  Walls capable of defending intellectual freedom have the capacity to become barriers to change.

To witness Oxford through this lens is to see it as both moral architecture and living allegory.  Tolkien’s fiction often embodies this duality; his created worlds are deeply architectural spaces with philological foundations.  From The Hobbit, through The Lord of the Rings, to The Silmarillion, language and landscape are intertwined.  Like Oxenaforda, names carry histories and the shapes of those spaces can reflect the virtue or corruption of their makers, though deciding which is often ambiguous.  As a scholar of Old English and Old Norse languages, among others, and with a passion for the etymology, he understood as well as anyone how words are the building stones of meaning; constructed, inherited, and inhabited.  The same could be said of the University with its languages, rituals, and structures forming a living grammar through which thought is shaped and expressed.

My encounter with Oxford showed me a city poised between reverence and renewal.  There was beauty in its resistance to haste, and I was humbled seeing how small I was in the timeline of this venerated institution.  Yet I was aware of the digital current that was running beneath and through the city, from my first online connection to the Tolkien Special Collections curator at home to the constant accessibility to the Library’s resources from any internet connected device.  Oxford had once been a city living on the border of Mercia and Wessex, and it now exists between the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds.  This liminal heritage makes Oxford both a guardian of and a conduit for its cultural riches, with Wi-Fi access points connected to medieval walls and online catalogs beside illuminated manuscripts, the cloister has entered a new epoch.  Learning now occurs as much in invisible networks as in visible rooms.  Oxford, for all its solemnity, is still a place in motion.  Beneath the echo of bells runs another rhythm; the quiet pulse of servers and signals, the unseen cloister of the modern mind.  The question that arises is, if the architecture of a space is expressly moral in its design and construction, how do digital spaces reflect or diverge from that same framework?

As I considered that question, I rejoined my cohort to attend the first of our lectures at Wolfson College.  Wolfson is a far more modern college, situated beside the River Cherwell in North Oxford.  In many ways it was like returning home, as the design and layout were so different from those of the older Oxford colleges, and the history of its architecture makes it contemporary to Simon Fraser University.  Established in 1965, Wolfson’s first president, Isaiah Berlin envisioned Wolfson College to reflect the radically democratic ideals of the day.  According to Michael Ignatieff, in his biography of Berlin, a decision had been made.

The place, in Berlin’s words, was to be “new, untrammelled and unpiramided”.  Just as he wished, the barriers between faculty and students present in the other Oxford colleges were dismantled: no high table; common rooms common to all; gowns to be worn only on special occasions.  In addition, there was to be a crèche and family accommodation.

Tolkien, with his love of the tradition and history of old Oxford and general distaste of change, would certainly have been horrified.  In a letter to his son Christopher in 1944, Tolkien made his views about modern architecture quite clear:

The chief damage has been the growth of great flat featureless modern buildings. The worst of all is the ghastly multiple-store erection on the old site. … I won’t weary you with impressions of the ghastly utterly third-rate new school buildings. But if you can imagine a building better than most Oxford colleges being replaced by what looks like a girls’ council school, you’ve got it and my feelings.

But the age had turned and progress was a force that could not be stopped.  Berlin’s campus of concrete and airy spaces echoed what had been built just a few short years earlier in Burnaby, British Columbia by local architects Arthur Erickson and Geoff Massey.  Both schools attempted to reflect the ’60s zeitgeist and both were a conscious reply against the formalism of the traditional Oxford campus. 

While only a brisk twenty-minute walk from the main Oxford core, Wolfson’s perch on the banks of the Cherwell made it feel as though I were on a romantic holiday on the river.  According to Jeremy Black in his article on the history of the college’s architecture, “Isaiah Berlin, Wolfson College and Portofino,” the design of the main buildings, “deliberately evokes that of a town on the Italian Riviera.” The comparison between Berlin’s beloved Portofino harbour, where he had a house, and the design of Wolfson College is striking:

Portofino harbour juxtaposed with Wolfson College

Not merely the whims of a wealthy, influential, and world-travelled College president, Berlin’s direction to mimic the curvature of the Portofino harbour came from a desire to soften the brutalism of the design and mimic what is found in nature.  The direction to the architects was pointed when he asked: “Can it be the sylvan scene of ‘Cherwell’, where everything curls and curves, and the trees, branches, grass, stream, each pursues its irregular complex lines and fantastic patterns—is it here that rectilinear rigours are most suitable? Let me persuade you to a shape less stiff.” While “eco-brutalism” is a recent label, its core idea is not new; early proponents of brutalism, including Berlin and Erickson, consistently aimed to integrate their severe geometries with the landscape around them.

Looking out over the punts and swans in the water of Wolfson harbour, I was struck by how the reflections of the trees and countryside of Oxford drew the surrounding view of England into the building itself.  This outward facing orientation suggested an openness to the outer world in stark contrast to the more traditionally gated Oxford model.  A different use of reflection appeared at Erickson’s Simon Fraser Burnaby campus, where water is purposely positioned to cast the buildings back toward the viewer, inverting and subverting the expectations of those who pass through.  Self-examination is implied in the SFU pools, subtly importing the ideals of the cloister into an architecture that was created as an inversion to the Oxbridge design.

Inescapably with the shifts in perspectives, I was repeatedly reminded of the digital layer that flows underneath and through these campuses.  Wolfson’s gesture of inviting the outer world inward, paired with the introspective message of SFU’s reflecting pools, mirrors the possibilities of the digital world where connection or isolation are simultaneously possible.

On returning to Canada I wanted to experience the difference between being there and back again, so I made the pilgrimage to Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain.  Where Oxford’s ancient stones were an inescapable reality, it was the low cloud and misty rain that permeated the experience of SFU, the trees standing like sentinels watching silently as I mounted the summit.  Cut and terraced into the mountain itself, the school seemed almost to be an embodiment of intention bursting out of the stones of that ancient tor, the concrete buildings a continuance of the stones that lay beneath.  The heaviness of the design shouted the hand of its maker, yet it integrated into the landscape as a spine of stone; echoing the need to conform just as the Berlin wall at Wolfson mimicked the arc of the Rivera.  As I approached Convocation Mall with the mist in my face and the forest all around, it could not have been a more quintessential Canadian experience, and yet the rest of the world was imminent; connected through digital veins that lived alongside those stony bones.

If Oxford’s cloisters sought a guarded continuity, the terraces of SFU were designed for disruption.  Erickson and Massey envisioned a “radical campus” that would embody openness, participation, and critical thought rather than hierarchy and their designs translated that mandate into structure and space.  The buildings of SFU disdain ornament and expose their very structure as a statement.  The Lamp of Truth is brought to bear here, highlighting the importance of honesty in material and method as Ruskin insists that architecture must avoid “pretence, concealment, and deceit.” The angular design reveals the makings of the structure at its core, laid bare without pretense, and elevates those inflection points of wood where it is layered into the spaces alongside the activity of the people within.  Where Oxford conceals its centuries beneath ivy and artifice, SFU displays its concrete bones to the sky.

As I read Erickson’s Learning Systems chapter on the creation of Simon Fraser University campus I was struck by his willingness to deliberately go against the instruction of the contest.  While the competition asked for “five buildings-an arts building, a science facility, library, theatre and gymnasium,” Erickson viewed the separation of the buildings as another in a long line of bureaucratic decisions that placed the needs of the business of the university above those of its learners.  Instead of separation, Erickson chose to create community in a way that would link “faculties and would encourage the growth and accommodation of the new disciplines then proliferating in the gaps between the traditional ones.” This idea of accommodating interdisciplinarity is evidenced in the vast halls of SFU, its classrooms spilling into public corridors and sightlines that seem to run to the horizon.

As I stood in one of SFU’s long halls, I could see an abundance of knowledge, the freedom of movement the architecture implies that would bring learners and teachers into interaction with one another in a borderless configuration.  Thinking back to the courtyards, castle walls, and gates defining the boundaries of the Oxford colleges, there could hardly be a different approach to the context in which knowledge is being produced.  While Erickson didn’t view this new approach as a complete rejection of the elements of the Oxbridge design since he developed his own take on the traditional quadrangle, he attempted to infuse the idea with Buddhist and Far Eastern philosophy and juxtaposed the serenity of the quad with the raucous and lively space of the covered mall.  This balancing of the energy in both places acknowledged the full life of a student and was key during a time where student protests were a driving force of activism seeking to achieve societal change. 

Erickson continued work on the remaining buildings after the initial phase of the university had opened.  When a Shell Gas station was proposed for the mountain, student unrest quickly followed; students wore “Shell Out” buttons, and the plan was swiftly discarded.  This unrest culminated in days of student protests and even included:

an ‘occupation’ but I was confident that no damage would be done, for the very nature of the university plan defied riot. There was no building that could be targeted as “theirs.” Someone later suggested to me that the very urban nature of the campus defused violence, for everyone was crowded into a shared situation and forced to resolve their differences.

Here we can see Ruskin’s idea of the Lamp of Sacrifice in action as he notes: “Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.” Ruskin includes an accompanying aphorism that extends the idea even further: “All architecture proposes an effect on the human mind, not merely a service to the human frame.” We can see the way Erickson’s ethics of community was transmitted through his designs and shaped the way protest activity took place during that time.  This event justifies Ruskin’s assertion that architectural design is a transmitter of moral ideas.

The interdisciplinary structure of Erickson’s SFU design may have had some conceptual momentum picked up by Dr. Evan Alderson in his proposal for the Graduate Liberal Studies program during the 1990s.  Interviews with Dr. Alderson and other founding members of the program will help provide insights into the influence Erickson’s designs may have had as well as helping to show how GLS lives within the ongoing tradition of the Liberal Arts, owing what it does to Oxford and other schools.  This throughline of architectural, moral spaces, and their effect on learning is a critical line of inquiry for the success and future of the Academy in general and Liberal Studies in particular.  These ideas must be interrogated in future academic study in the context of how the digital world and its spaces are changing the learning environment in ways that advance and complicate learning.  As Melanie O’Brian notes in the introduction to Learning Systems, Erickson’s questions on the systems of learning in the Academy relate directly to the Liberal Arts: “What is the university’s role in culture? What is architecture’s role? How is knowledge generated? What is a university’s responsibility to a future? And he makes clear that if the university does not adequately question itself, it is the arts’ role to do so.” Considered alongside the realities of an increasingly digital world, they represent questions the Academy can no longer afford to leave unanswered.

My reflections on the design of SFU highlighted the sense of how digital change now shapes institutions as dramatically as physical architecture does.  As a child of the digital age I have brought a connection to that world with me wherever I go.  I grew up in the 1970s just as personal home computers were entering the market and my parents, despite not having much money, prioritized purchasing one, seeing the promise of how this technology would alter the world.  With an ethos of nearly constant change being part of my upbringing, I found the complaints of Tolkien and Ruskin against progress, mass-production, and speed of change difficult to engage with.  Surely it was part of the human drive toward improvement to lift ourselves out of the dark, out of poverty, and out of ignorance and that the goalposts for progress are always moving forward.  Like so many opposing arguments, however, there is a middle-ground that finds the truth.  Further, Ruskin’s moral ideals can be brought to bear on the digital world that now exists all around us and may provide a way to see the morality behind the digital spaces that are being created.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, post-secondary education was forced to engage more fully with digital learning platforms than ever before.  According to a report from the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association (CDLRA), the “proportion of courses delivered in a fully online formation rose from 10% in Fall 2019 to 81% in Fall 2020.” This marked a crisis point in a transformation that had been gathering momentum since at least the Second World War.  Rüegg describes the expansion and managerial complexity that had been rising as follows:

…the period since 1945 in most of Europe has seen the spread of the influence of university management – seeping downwards in the institution from the university, to the faculty, to the department and to the individual; spreading horizontally across all of the activities of the university; and strengthening the institutional boundary in relation to external authorities.

Rüegg goes on to describe the loss of the university’s monopoly in knowledge creation which has accelerated exponentially with the rise of computers and other advanced technology:

…the sources of the development and transmission of knowledge were such by the 1980s that the university was losing its monopoly position in its main field of activity…as commercial and industrial activity became more knowledge-based so the research laboratories and in-company training schools of private corporations were becoming competitors of the university towards the end of the period.

As a result of these pressures, according to the CBC, humanities programs have seen enrollments decline “by about 70,000 students per year between the early 1990s and the 2022-2023 school year, according to Statistics Canada data.” This is a pattern that has been followed, almost inevitably, by subsequent budget reductions.  To counter these pressures, digitally distributed learning could prove to be one of the best cost-saving measures that might aid the continuity of these programs.  From a business perspective, digitally distributed learning provides opportunities for lower real estate costs, space reallocation to higher return programs, scheduling efficiencies, and expanded enrollment opportunities along with resilience to enrollment volatility.

However, Tolkien and Ruskin’s concerns about fast modernization and the rise of capitalism and mass production provide needed guidance here.  Techno-optimism can lead to unintended consequences or create a false sense of security, whether in promises of AI replacing manual tasks without costs to human creativity or in policies that delay climate change action on the belief that we will address those concerns with future technology solutions.  The morality of digital spaces needs to be considered as much as physical ones, particularly the risks that these platforms might isolate inhabitants instead of creating engagement.  Caution should be taken that university administrators are not tempted to accelerate institutions’ profit-driven priorities, if we believe what Tolkien warned against has come to the Academy as a whole.

In theory, the digital world promises democratization as it connects anyone with an internet connection together, yet accessibility alone does not guarantee equality.  The algorithms we see in social media and other platforms that shape visibility and guide search functions can create exclusion as much as the gates of the Oxford colleges.  Alternately, that very democratization exposes inhabitants of a digital space to potential bad actors, leaving them wishing for the safety of the very gates that can create exclusion.  Ruskin’s words about the Lamp of Life ring true here regarding the digital space: “Architecture more than in any other; for it, being especially dependent, as we have just said, on the warmth of the true life.” No matter the digital space that is created, it only has value when it is guided and curated by human hands.

As I sit at home with my travels complete, my own space rests between a library of over two thousand books and the glow of a forty-five inch ultrawide monitor, an environment that connects me digitally to both Simon Fraser University and Oxford.  In this juxtaposition, it is clear Ruskin has more to teach us in regards to the morality of digital spaces.  How do we humanize the digital experience of Liberal Studies, sustaining exploration and conversation within an online community?  How must that digital space be constructed to best support community-building across a broad set of demographics from age, race, location, and digital competency?  How can we effectively guard against unintended consequences within virtual platforms using tools such as community guides, active and automated moderation, and digital sovereignty that ensures student data is protected under the laws of Canada?  These questions will guide my future research.  As I close my books and dim the screen, I once more feel that subtle shift I sensed my first night in Oxford; the sense of standing in a liminal space where old paths and new currents meet, and where the work of learning continues to unfold between them.

*

Bibliography

Bisek, Ben. Photograph of Weston Library entrance. In Oxford’s New Bodleian Library Has Had a Radical Modernist Makeover, The Independent, April 14, 2015. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/oxford-s-new-bodleian-library-has-had-a-radical-modernist-makeover-a133961.htm

Black, Jeremy. “Isaiah Berlin, Wolfson College and Portofino” The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, Oxford. 1992-93. https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/tribute/porto1.htm

CBC Radio. “Arts and Humanities Practical.” The Current, CBC Radio One, July 22, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/arts-and-humanities-practical-1.7469940

Ignatieff, Michael. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998.

@industrialkonzept Team. “Eco Brutalism – On the meaning of Eco Brutalism.” industrialkonzept Blog, March 13, 2023. https://industrialkonzept.com/blogs/editorial/eco-brutalism

Johnson, Nicole. “The Impact of the Pandemic on Higher Education – a Canadian Perspective on Digital Learning.” Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education Blog, November 19, 2021, www.qaa.ac.uk/news-events/blog/the-impact-of-the-pandemic-on-higher-education-a-canadian-perspective-on-digital-learning

Poetry Foundation. “Thyrsis: A Monody to Commemorate the Author’s Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough.” Accessed November 21, 2025. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43608/thyrsis-a-monody-to-commemorate-the-authors-friend-arthur-hugh-clough

Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice; and Examples of the Architecture of Venice. Vols. 9–11 of The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 156 Charing Cross Road; New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903.

Ruskin, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Vol. 8 of The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 156 Charing Cross Road; New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Mariner Books, 2000.

*

Scott Gibson examines the history and spatial dimensions of the university, with particular attention to how physical environments shape the practice of education. His current research considers how institutional spaces influence approaches to teaching and learning, and extends to the role of digital environments in shaping educational experience. Separately, he engages the work of René Girard and mimetic theory and has previously written on mimetic desire in Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster