Carson Bonner, Berry alumna (26C)

I graduated from Berry this past May, and if you ask me what stuck with me most about my four years there, it isn’t a class or a professor or even a specific memory. It’s the campus itself.

I remember touring Berry for the first time and feeling like I had stepped into a different era. The gothic architecture of the Ford Complex, the brick buildings across Main Campus, the barns and cottages. None of it looked like any other college I had toured. It didn’t feel manufactured or designed by committee. It felt like it had grown out of the land.

Part of what makes Berry unique, nationally and not just regionally, is that so much of its early campus was built by the very students who studied there. You can walk past a building and know that a student not much older than you cut the logs or laid the bricks that made it possible for them to get an education.

That kind of purposeful work is baked into Berry’s architecture. You don’t have to read a plaque to understand it, you just have to look around. It’s certainly not something you find on most college campuses. Berry is a phenomenal exception when it comes to colleges that show their history through preserved architecture.

I spent four years doing homework in buildings my professors told me predated the interstate highway system. I took classes in spaces that had been standing since before my grandparents were born, and I don’t think that experience was a museum exercise. It was closer to the opposite.

Those buildings were still alive, still being used exactly as they were meant to be, by students not so different from the ones who built them. Somewhere in those four years, I stopped thinking of the campus as just the place where my education happened and started thinking of it as part of the education itself. You can’t really separate what Martha Berry built from what she was trying to teach. The head, the heart and the hands all show up in the architecture, not just the curriculum.

I think that’s true for a lot of alumni, whether they graduated five years ago or fifty. Ask anyone who went to Berry what they picture when they think about their time there, and I’d bet most of them picture a building before they picture a classroom. Whether it’s the Bell Recital Hall, Laughlin or Frost Chapel, those are the images that come to mind when people try to describe what Berry felt like, and they’re often the images that come to mind for prospective students too, long before they ever set foot on campus. That’s a rare thing for a college to have, and I think it matters for Berry’s future as much as its past.

Plenty of schools can offer a strong education; far fewer can offer a campus that tells you, just by walking through it, exactly how and why the school came to exist. If Berry wants to remain strong, safe and relevant for generations of students still to come, I’d argue that the sense of place — the history you can see and touch, not just read about — is exactly what it should be building on, not building over. It’s what has always set Berry apart to me, and I suspect it’s what will keep setting it apart for a long time