Bells, Gargoyles, and University

by H.E. Whitney, Jr.

University Archaisms: Campus Bells, Gargoyles, and Reflections on the University’s Purpose

The central campus bell at my university clangs promptly at 8am (beginning of the school/work day), noon (lunchtime), and 5pm (end of the work day, although classes still begin and last long after that hour). A different campus bell that is off in the distance softly chimes each hour and each half hour between those three all-important hours.

I have often wondered whether the university really needs a campus bell to mark specific times during the day since virtually everyone on campus—professor and student alike–has access to time through cellular devices.  (I would perhaps, in a less sober state, argue that the cell phone is probably even more ubiquitous than time itself.)  Moreover, the campus bell’s marking of time appears somewhat superfluous when we consider that the human body has its own internal chronometer (e.g., the lunch hour stomach roar or morning caffeine withdrawal) to direct our actions.

Perhaps the real reason for the campus bell is not simply to signal specific times throughout the day but to provide a rather sentimental image of the university’s religious past. Obviously, most listeners would think of a church when hearing the campus bell. But would this perception be valid for universities or colleges that have had no historical affiliation with any particular religious congregation or sect? This image would be particularly ironic for an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth when there is nothing in its history to signify an affiliation with a religious past. While my institution does have such an affiliation in its history with religion (the university originally began as a seminary), other universities that make prodigious use of campus bells–universities whose origins or history have had no religious roots whatsoever—seem to be promoting a false image of themselves and their history.

Gargoyles populate my university’s campus (probably more prominently than students) and some of them are built into the sidewalk to serve as barricades for limiting vehicle access to walkways. One of the original uses of gargoyles during the age of Gothic architecture was to serve as water conduits on building tops. So there is some awkwardness in seeing gargoyles springing from the pavement instead of howling or spewing water from the roofs of campus buildings.

Additionally, one of the important uses of the gargoyle during the age of Gothic architecture was to scare off evil spirits. Yet I seriously doubt universities that adorn their landscapes or buildings with gargoyles wish to be even seen as postulating the existence of spiritual realms since we are so far along now in the age of force, gravity, and quarks. (Ironic, isn’t it, that science has perhaps enabled us to discard outmoded occult powers and entities for its own!)

The archaisms of the campus bell and the gargoyle raise several questions. Should we think of the university as a monastic institution? If we do, then such a thought would seem to suggest that the university was a secluded, regimented sort of place where the study of scripture and the striving for the religious ideal were dominant goals. We certainly don’t have anything close to that anymore in academia: modern universities in America have for the most part become skill factories and groupings of social networks geared to prepare students for the work life instead of for the next life. In many universities that have dominant business and/or technical programs, students in those programs will probably have taken little or no classes in religion or the human disciplines for the matter.

In light of business world criticisms of the humanities disciplines, should we be concerned that universities now want to limit the exposure of their students to the human disciplines by requiring undergraduates take a bare minimum of “mandatory” or “required” classes that involve writing and/or critical thinking?

It is one thing to make writing a “requirement”: advertising any class as a requirement generally frightens the student into taking the class. And when they finally take the class (sometimes after much delay), they put little effort into it (sometimes only barely passing).

It’s another thing to make such subjects appealing as pleasures for their own sake. Universities need to show students how writing well can not only enhance their lives materially (obviously no employer wants to hire someone who can’t put together a sentence) but also provide a genuine source of intellectual pleasure. This would also be true of critical thinking which teaches students not only how to detect fallacious reasoning but to craft valid, sound arguments. The problem is that the all too familiar routines and character of modern life–with its churning, whirring, push button, bleeping, pop up, point and click efficiency–often resists critical thinking and literariness. Modernity, with its obsession with technological domination and instant satisfaction, has perhaps relegated the very idea of intellectual pleasure to the dustbin of archaisms.

I guess this is just a midday mental meandering. Or a tea-time rambling: depending on what time your internal chronometer tells you it is.

H.E. Whitney, Jr. is a PhD student in history at Florida State University. H.E’s fields of study are the history of science, intellectual history, and technology and culture. H.E. is originally from Suffolk, Virginia but has called California, Ohio, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Florida home at some point. H.E. has taught philosophy and graphic design/multimedia studies at the college level and enjoy creating digital art when not pontificating on scientific, cultural, or historical matters

Discovering Single-Serve Coffee, Keurig versus Tassimo

By Jeffrey the Barak

Let me start this tale with the bottom line, I prefer the Keurig. Okay, now that’s out of the way, I’ll take it from the top.

I feel like I’m on vacation, making good coffee with a single push of a button, and letting the hard work of earlier times fade into memory.

Until a month ago I was at the tail end of an obsession lasting for decades, the obsession of making espresso based drinks at home. Normally, I would be the only one drinking these concoctions, and yet, at the end I had an array of equipment worth $1,400 and still, I could produce a lousy drink if I wasn’t careful.

So one day, while out of town, I drank a cup of regular joe, and it wasn’t half bad. In fact I liked it. Upon returning home and getting some fresh milk for my latte and going through the usual grinding, wiping, cleaning, tamping, more wiping, warming, wiping, pulling, wiping, steaming, wiping etc etc. a seed in my mind began to grow. Do I really need to spend all this time every day as a full time cleaner, just to drink a few cups of coffee?

As I was cleaning the coffee ground stains out of my grout lines with bleach one day, I considered getting a coffee pot, or a French press, or a glass cone or some kind of system that would quickly and easily make a good cup of coffee, but I wanted more. I wanted to remove stale grounds and mess and even the challenge keeping milk fresh from the equation. Enter the concept of single serve coffee.

Now years ago, during my espresso equipment escalation, I had a super automatic espresso machine, which in theory would make a drink with one button push. But behind that push was a lot of hidden cleaning work and I have to say the drinks were pretty awful. So it was with some skepticism that I first turned my attention to the Bosch Tassimo and the Keurig systems.

Since the Tassimo offered the option of pseudo cappuccinos, lattes and espressos, I began with that system. I found it to be a brilliantly clever system, but the only drink varieties that were not pretty darned awful, were the brewed coffee varieties from venture partners Starbucks and Seattle’s Best. And even these were nothing to get excited about, despite their very high cost per cup. The milk drinks, lattes, macchiatos, cappuccinos etc., were practically undrinkable to me, mainly due to to the Ultra-Heat-Treated milk, as were the Gevalia brand T-Discs, which were almost as bad as instant coffee.

Enter the Keurig B60. It had me at cup one. Paired with the Tully’s French and other bold blends, it was heaven in a mug right from the start. Similar as the systems may be in concept, the drink quality is very different. To put it simply, one system makes generally poor coffee and the other makes great coffee.

Also, over the course of the experiment, I trained myself to enjoy dry-powder fat-free Coffee Mate creamer in place of milk, because milk is only fresh for a short while, and with the long shelf life of the T-Discs and K-Cups, the Coffee-Mate made a lot of sense. If I was to take a trip, not only would I miss my Keurig, I’d also be able to return home and immediately be able to have a fresh cup, without shopping for milk.

As I said at the beginning, I chose the Keurig over the Tassimo. But nothing is perfect, so here are my four small criticisms of the Keurig B60.

1. It is too tall to fit under my upper cabinets and be able to be opened to drop in a K-Cup. For this, I blame my kitchen design, not the Keurig.
2. Compared to the Tassimo, it takes a couple of minutes to warm up and makes a sound like an electric tea kettle as it does so. The Tassimo was immediately ready as soon as the switch was flipped. However, I can program the Keurig to switch on shortly before I stumble downstairs in the morning, so I have a workaround for the slower morning start.
3. The Keurig is also a bit noisier than the Tassimo, but still quieter than lots of things, including a grinder, a vibration pump espresso machine, a working steam wand etc . I would not call it a loud device by any standard.
4. The water reservoir of the Keurig is a little tricky to hold onto with one hand when filling at the faucet, but then there is always a jug.

Keurig is owned by Green Mountain Coffee, and the more I look at the way they do business, the more impressed I am. The only thing I am a little uncomfortable with, is the fact that they successfully sued Kraft, the maker of the Tassimo, for seventeen million dollars, for copyright infringement with regard to the similarity of the Tassimo T-Disc system to the Keurig K-Cup system. Apparently, the court thought Keurig were right about it, but then what came before both systems? The pod. Now what if Illy sues Keurig, saying the plastic K-Cup is similar to a paper pod? Having had a Tassimo and a Keurig, I think they are very different in how they do things and I am surprised that the law suit was successful. But I wasn’t in that courtroom so maybe there was evidence of direct infringement.

Anyway, who cares about law when there’s good coffee around. And with the Keurig system, there is a lot of good coffee. Every K-Cup I have tried, is far better than even the best of the best T-Discs. And that is the bottom line. I think the Tassimo may even be a better machine than a Keurig in many ways, but if the drink is not fantastic, what’s the point? As long as you don’t use the silly travel mug button and bitterly over extract the dose of coffee in a K-Cup that was designed to make a smaller cup of coffee, you cannot go wrong with a Keurig.