Through the front gates, you enter the oasis: the sights change, the sounds disappear, and suddenly, you can hear yourself think. You have successfully escaped the city. Having been ushered along the narrow entrance, Front Square expands and gives you room to breathe. You forget about the hustle and bustle of Dame Street and readjust to a different way of life, one marked by the contrasting experiences of students animated by their timetables and tourists visiting for the first time. Struck by the architecture of the buildings and the history that hangs in the air, tourists begin to move at a slower pace, one that matches the pace of the college itself. The city will always be in motion – the skyline around campus will slowly change and buildings will rise and start to tower over it, but the campus itself will remain outwardly the same.
While Trinity is a static entity in an otherwise rapidly changing city, the city has been forced to mould itself around it. College Green is one of Dublin’s major points of intersection and public transportation nodes, and the Luas has two stops attached to the campus. Trinity stands as a massive roundabout in the middle of the city, around which everyone orbits. Yet, the university does not provide an incentive for people to enter, other than on its own terms. Trinity is a centrally located campus – an enormous number of people cross its borders every day, to the point where it sometimes feels more stifling than breathable, but in reality, the campus is only semi-permeable. It is fundamentally shaped by both physical walls and invisible barriers that restrict outward and inward flows of people.
Anyone can technically enter the campus during most hours of the day, but only certain groups do. Students, faculty and staff, and tourists enter for different reasons, but all do so on a transactional basis. Tourists are invited to take photos of the buildings, visit the Book of Kells experience, and most importantly, spend time in the gift shop. Bonus points if they stop by the Perch café. It’s not only the old buildings that attract tourists, it’s the idea of Trinity itself. Standing at this year’s Freshers’ Fair, I saw countless tourists flood the campus, confused and perplexed but mostly fascinated by the spectacle of it all. Instead of detracting from their photos, we added value in the foreground. By contrast, Trinity offers little to attract the local population of Dublin.
Movement in the other direction is similarly restricted. Trinity’s campus is a physical bubble, but it’s a social one too. As Trinity students, we follow the same fashion microtrends, reflecting how we interact with culture. We speak the same language, one influenced by seminars, lectures, and readings. Broadly, we lead similar lives shaped by our relation to the campus, which the rest of the city has no way of replicating. Part of Trinity’s appeal is that it gives you access to the city of Dublin and all it has to offer, and students can easily come and go as they please, but there is little reason to do so.
What Trinity’s campus has reveals what the rest of the city doesn’t have, socially and financially. Outside an oasis is the desert, which, in many ways, is the trajectory that we see unfolding in the city. Modern-day cities are lonely and atomising places, and Dublin is no exception, where the expansion of the tech sector is rapidly crowding out local communities. There are a few third spaces available for young people to socialise without having to pay, which leads us to stay within the boundaries – and the comfort – of our own campus. Trinity is a social space, but we only ever socialise with people who share our lifestyles. It’s a harsh reality, then, to graduate and find yourself lonely in the big city without the social avenues that university campuses provide.
Financially, the city and the campus are even more polarised. To attract tourists, elite universities need to be kept in pristine condition, and this requires vast sums of money. When you enter the campus, you no longer see the city’s economic problems – the derelict houses, the poor standards of living, and the homelessness. The campus remains a fixed entity in a fluctuating, and in many ways declining, city, whose problems will never reach it.
The economic disparity between elite university institutions and the cities they’re located in is not a phenomenon specific to Trinity but can be seen all across the UK, too. Cambridge is one of that country’s most unequal cities, and Scottish universities like Edinburgh have come under fire for alienating local students, who are more likely to come from working-class backgrounds. There is a certain snobbery that exists at elite universities, which implicitly targets local communities, but this is largely a reflection of the very real division between university campuses and cities. There are a few communities left to integrate into, but why would students? The university campus provides what the city no longer can.
