Abstract

he banal catch phrase of the real estate industry suggests that the only thing more important than location is ... well . . . location. But what every real estate agent knows is that location is more than the material, more than the physical orientation of a place. Location involves the imagination. The economy, geology, geography, demographics, aesthetics, and history of a surrounding region, or neighborhood, all figure into the idea of a particular place-hence into its value. Landowners, and would-be owners, are not buying and selling mere property, but ideas about the way property works. Essentially, then, the real estate industry focuses on the buying and selling of ideas about place. While I am not going to suggest that real estate and higher education are completely similar enterprises, I do see a compelling, and somewhat helpful, analogy. Like real estate, higher education is promoting, attempting to get students to buy (into) ideas about place. The ideas have value, and like plots of land, their value is based on an intersection of the material and conceptual, of the real and the imagined. In other words, the value of academia for students depends upon their interpretation or creation of academic space. To buy (into) academia (and its attendant postures, behaviors, and perspectives), students must buy (into) a particular conception of the terrain. However, the processes of learning academic terrain are far more complicated than the processes of buying a plot of land. Students do not merely buy the terrain of academia as one might buy a new house. As students enter into academic space, they must, at the same time, enter into its making. And succeeding at such a feat requires significant guidance. Students must learn a vast array of cartographic skills which