Spartan Lawyer Winter 2018
FACULTY VOICES: CHARLES J. TEN BRINK
A Changing Landscape
When I came to Michigan State as a freshman in 1972, straight from a farm in western Michigan, I felt as though I had landed in Oz.1 My dorm had more people in it than my home town, and East Lansing seemed like the height of urban sophistication. I loved getting to know my way around the campus and the city, which I thought of as one undivided whole. It would take some time before I began to recognize the tensions that always exist between town and gown, but that intruded very little at the time. And I had little understanding of the changes facing the city, ranging from going ‘wet’ in 1971 to the opening of Meridian Mall in 1969.
Unlike many graduates, I never really lost contact with my college town, so I never idealized, as many do, its status during the four years I spent here earning a bachelor’s degree. I had friends here and was always within easy visiting distance. I became accustomed to the loss of the familiar, and the acceptance of change – so long as the Peanut Barrel was the axis mundi of the city, it could never really feel alien. There would always, I imagined, be places like Bunches or the PanTree, or Jacobson’s or Jocundry’s, even if their current avatars were no longer with us. “The older order changeth, yielding place to new . . . ”2
My return to Michigan State and East Lansing came in 2001, after a long sojourn in the city that actually calls itself Chicagoland, like some gigantic and slightly menacing urban amusement park. For all its faults, it is a vibrant place, dedicated to urban change. And upon my return it was borne in upon me that East Lansing had not fared well in the time I had been only a visitor; perhaps I had idealized it after all. Grand River Avenue now seemed less like a downtown than a collection of bars and noodle shops. Major businesses had fled the City, and students were being warehoused in distant Bath Township. As an employee at (but not of) Michigan State University, I also became more keenly aware of the conflicts between the City and University, many of them related to land use and development. Those conflicts were the culmination of a half-century of urban decision-making that seem in hindsight dedicated to maintaining a city that housed Michigan Agricultural College, not the Research I institution that it had long since blossomed into.
Yet dramatic change has come to East Lansing. A traveler down Grand River Avenue is immediately struck by the construction cranes erecting new and – for East Lansing – dauntingly tall buildings. I adopted one of these projects, Center City, as the case study for my land use planning classes, and immersed myself in the politics and economics of this change, and the legal issues they have generated. I was struck by the fervor of advocates for and against these projects. I understood the wistful desire that things could go on as they are. “People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they’re really saying is that something you didn’t want to happen at all . . . has happened.”3
No, change isn’t always a good thing. But failure to accept change can be debilitating, while embracing it makes us stronger. It occurs to me that this is a metaphor for the College of Law, long ‘at’ but not formally ‘of’ the University. We are embarking upon the final chapter of our long affiliation with the University, and at last changing that simple preposition to one that connotes full membership. There is an enormously detailed amount of work to be done to accomplish this. It is work that I am confident will be done with consideration and equity, and I look forward to being a part of it.
1 Of course I had visited the campus many times before, on trips to summer 4H events, a memory that seems more like part of the 19th than the 20th century.
2 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur.
3 “You’ve Got Mail”