Letters from the Field: #2 and #3

In September 2025, the Modernism & Environment SIG launched "Letters from the Field,” an ongoing series for the Modernism, Energy & Environment forum. In Letter 1, Sookyoung Lee outlines the genesis of the project and invites conversation about what it means to think, write, and teach in a time of accelerating and interrelated crises. In Letters 2 and 3, presented together here, Caroline Hovanec and Anne Raine continue the conversation with reflections on how to reclaim the university as environmental infrastructure and how to orient our teaching toward engagement in the public sphere. As these and future letters appear, readers should, and we suspect will, feel inspired, unsettled, and provoked into reflection and response. We hope you will submit your own letters (which can be featured here) as we all reckon with the resonant and ruinous constellations of modernity. Please email me.   —Thomas S. Davis, forum editor

Letter #2: Letter from Florida

By Caroline Hovanec

Dear colleagues,

I write from Tampa, Florida, where last year’s back-to-back hurricanes have subsided into this year’s drought, and where I have been thinking obsessively about the university as environmental infrastructure. Like Virginia Woolf’s narrator Mary Beton in A Room of One’s Own, I have “sat down on the banks of a river” on a university campus. I’ve thought about how this place “once… was marsh too” and still would be if not for the labor of previous generations “to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain.” I have “walk[ed] across a grass plot” on that campus, and there was no Beadle there to tell me women cannot walk on the turf. But when I began in 2024 to ask questions like, “Why are there so few native plants here?” and “Could we have a campus community garden?”, I was told only that decisions about landscaping are the purview of upper administration (and not, I inferred, English professors). And like Mary Beton, I felt abashed.

Then came Hurricanes Helene and Milton, emptying our low-lying campus for nearly two weeks. When faculty and students returned, we were informed that to appease our accreditors’ expectations for seat time, we must make up the eight missed class days through weekend classes or equivalent remote learning activities. The precarious material infrastructure of our campus, located in Evacuation Zone A, collided with the rigid institutional infrastructure of accreditation bodies and administrative directives. But it seemed to me that these institutional infrastructures were designed without increasingly frequent climate disasters in mind. Who is thinking about building climate-resilient and climate-responsible universities, I wondered, and how do I get a seat at that table?

A Room of One’s Own is famous for its feminist-materialist account of intellectual production. Woolf insisted that women need £500 a year, a room with a locked door, and a good meal to write good books. To this materialism of money and bodies, I would add, our understanding of intellectual labor also needs a materialism of environment. Woolf paid close attention to the ecological infrastructures of her Oxbridge and Fernham universities, their rivers and meadows and gardens. But the relationship of college campuses to climate change and biodiversity decline was hard to see in 1929.

That relationship is more visible now, but there are still forces of concealment at work. Not all greenery is green. My university’s campus in downtown Tampa, for example, is one of the most manicured campuses I’ve ever seen, bejeweled with palm trees, oleander, daisies, black crepe myrtles with raspberry-pink flowers, and orange-blooming ixora. The problem is that none of these species are native to Florida. (We also have a few native live oaks and, tucked away behind a parking garage, some native cabbage palms.)

This sort of generic, well-groomed landscaping (I’ve heard it compared to Disney World) is a missed ecological opportunity. Local wildlife depends on native plants for food and shelter. Without native host plants, caterpillars have nothing to eat; without caterpillars, birds struggle to feed their young; without birds and insects, the landscape becomes a dead zone, akin to what Rachel Carson described as a “silent spring,” even if it still looks attractively green. Evocatively, one key example of environmental toxicity in Silent Spring is from a university campus. In the 1950s, the robins at Michigan State disappeared. The culprit: pesticide accumulation in the local earthworms. One scientist told Carson, “The campus is serving as a graveyard.”

For my part, learning about native plants has triggered an aesthetic reeducation just as dramatic as my introduction to modernism twenty years ago as an undergraduate. Back then, I was surprised to find beauty in the strange, earthy lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jean Toomer’s Cane. Something happened when I encountered these texts that reoriented my senses. More recently, as I’ve become more literate in the language of plants, my perception has shifted again. Mowed grass, croton, and crepe myrtle now look hackneyed to my eyes. In Chicago for MSA, I visited the Lurie Garden and saw the upright, feathery forms and dry seedheads of perennials in their late-fall decay. These included many native prairie grasses of the sort that were plowed up to plant shallow-rooted crops a century ago, leading to the Dust Bowl.[1] Back on my university’s campus, the instant a bed of plants begins to brown or wither, it is ripped out and replaced with another pallet of glossy annuals. But as the Lurie Garden shows, there are other kinds of plant beauty and other ways of looking.

I also became attuned to more quietly alarming things about our campus landscaping. We are located on the Hillsborough River, with trim grass running straight to the water’s edge, perfect for students to throw down beach towels and sunbathe. This means that run-off from the campus, including any fertilizers or herbicides that are used, trickles right into the river. Nutrient pollution, bacterial overgrowth, and algae blooms are persistent issues in the river and the bay into which it feeds, especially after the recent hurricanes, which dumped tons of sewage into local waterways. Elsewhere along the riverfront, living shoreline projects use native marsh grasses and water-tolerant plants to create habitat, a natural filter for pollutants, and a space to soak up water during rainstorms. Perhaps a half-rewilded river of this sort would be more conducive to thinking the kind of thoughts that Woolf describes catching, like little fish, “the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line,” on the banks of Oxbridge’s river.

A campus is not an island, and its environmental impact does not stop at its physical borders. This is true not just of river stewardship, but of another feature of university infrastructure that is ubiquitous today but not mentioned at all in Woolf’s descriptions of Oxbridge and Fernham: the parking lot. Why, I often wonder as I walk around campus, when we are so short on student housing and classroom space, do we have so many parking spots? Yet I already know the answer. Tampa is one of the most car-dependent cities in perhaps the most car-dependent country in the world. Everyone drives, and if you don’t, you had better be prepared for a tripled commute time, a long wait at the bus stop in searing sun and exhaust fumes, or a dodgy bike ride across four to six lanes of traffic. What can one mid-sized university do when faced with this level of car infrastructure?

But it wasn’t always like this. At the turn of the twentieth century, the still-tiny Tampa was a train town. Henry B. Plant, one of the city’s founding fathers, was a railroad tycoon, and his railroad led right up to the back door of his Tampa Bay Hotel. That minareted palace is now known as Plant Hall, the university building that houses my office. In Plant’s day, alongside passenger rail, there were also electric streetcars that linked up downtown with Ybor City and West Tampa, homes of the Cuban, Spanish, and Sicilian émigrés who rolled cigars in the factories and were stirred by the revolutionary speeches of José Martí. The streetcar system grew and grew, and at its peak, during World War II, its rails surpassed 53 miles.

And then, almost overnight, it disappeared. In 1946, the streetcars were retired, the tracks torn up. Tampa was about to become car country. By the 1960s, as Black students in the city were organizing sit-ins to protest segregation at lunch counters downtown, I-275 was rising up into the sky behind them. This new freeway sliced through the historically Black neighborhoods of the Scrub and Central Avenue, along with the majority-Latino Ybor City. It is a story that played out a hundred times in a hundred American cities.

Today, the streetcar is back, so far only as a heritage line and tourist attraction, running just 2.7 miles from downtown to Ybor City. It’s not impossible, though, to imagine a future Tampa where the tracks of the early twentieth century have been rebuilt, bus rapid transit lanes connect the city’s neighborhoods to downtown, and less of our precious real estate on campus is devoted to asphalt and concrete storage for cars. These impermeable surfaces worsen flooding during heavy rains, and they serve private vehicles of the sort that are responsible for over a quarter of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. Parking lots are anti-environmental infrastructure. A climate-responsible university should have the historical sense to remember a time before them, and the imaginative will to envision a time when they will be torn up, just as the streetcar tracks were once torn up, this time to make space for something better.

Sookyoung Lee writes that the conversations at the Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis workshop in Chicago “kept returning to the first-order problem of the material conditions and the institutional conventions of academic labor. We are brought together by existing habits, spaces, and values, but these also often pose roadblocks to a more ambitious, radical envisioning of the commons.” Increasingly I feel that these material conditions, in both the economic and ecological senses, are the defining issue for my generation of teacher-scholars. At the same time, I want to note Soo’s metaphor and suggest that a roadblock might sometimes be a generative kind of infrastructure: opening things up for walkers and cyclists or embodying the collective power of protesters. Blocking roads might be just the kind of “ambitious, radical” task we should take on.

After I returned from MSA Boston in 2025, my American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter hosted Timothy Kaufman-Osborn to give a lecture on his book The Autocratic Academy. Kaufman-Osborn calls for a reconstitution of the American university into a “republican commonwealth.” This commonwealth university would be governed not by powerful administrators or unaccountable trustees but by its members.[2] On that kind of democratic campus, I think that even English professors would get a vote on how to manage our infrastructure. It would not be a grassy plot policed by latter-day Beadles, nor a graveyard for robins, still less a parking lot. It would be a commons worthy of the name.

In solidarity,

Cari

Notes