I so like it when Tent City erupts on Voorhees Mall: it means that classes are nearly finished, that spring is really here, and above all that there's a feeling of utopianism abroad (so very different from the post-Rutgerfest fallout: my students today were horrified by the event - massed drunkenness and gun shots and vandalism and general mayhem - which they had all, or almost all, attended - and pointed me in the direction of various videos on You Tube showing the fighting. And showing, I might add, the number of people who seemed to be standing watching the fighting and filming it on their iPhones ...).
It's Utopianism in the sense that I think Morris is imagining in News from Nowhere (which we're discussing in the grad class tomorrow), which effectively is very localized, but is aware of its global context. No one's going to imagine that anything much is going to get changed on a huge scale by Tent City - but living by its own principles, and offering up social and political awareness of all kinds is a great thing to have outside of Murray Hall. And this tent even manages to combine Rutgers Red with some tentative Christmas decorations, sparkling away.
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