While urban and suburban planning have received sustained scrutiny from rhetoric scholars in recent years, campus planning remains relatively unexplored. Enacting a framework for analyzing the conventional and unconventional planning discourse swirling around campuses, this article focuses on a specific case: the (in)effective provision of student housing at the University of California Irvine. The analysis juxtaposes formal planning documents tied to the post-WWII origins of UCI with historical and contemporary student-generated discourse to evaluate and exhibit the means by which inhabitants, as rhetoricians-in-residence, can participate in shaping the campus community.

This assignment deploys place-based pedagogy in a basic writing course, and enacts it through first-person research in the form of a walking tour of a university campus. Students first read and discuss two texts about their campus: an article analyzing campus architecture and a philosophical treatise about the campus park. Students then marshal evidence gathered through a walking tour to argue with one of these texts. In addition to bolstering students’ confidence for contesting claims advanced by authorities, this assignment encourages students and teachers alike to cultivate a more deliberate awareness of their surroundings. Because this assignment is meant to be grounded in a specific locale, instructors adapting this prompt are encouraged to seek out texts addressing their own institutional settings.

Since the 2016 U.S. election, faculty, staff, and students at more than 200 colleges and universities have petitioned for their campuses to be declared as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants, a preemptive move that pits academic institutions against federal authorities. Like many in academia, I first became aware of the sanctuary campus movement in the weeks following the 2016 election, when a link to a petition arrived in my inbox. Around this time, I began to encounter news stories about the movement and its various manifestations (Cleek 2017; Machado 2017), as well as indications that the movement was provoking conversations about the relationship between higher education and the broader civic tapestry (Xia 2017), the history of sanctuary spaces (Allen 2016), and the contemporary legal complexities of creating such spaces (Olivas 2016).

This article examines a debate from the early 1980s about siting the Nixon Presidential Library at UC Irvine. I analyze the debate as it unfolds across the pages of the campus newspaper, exploring the interplay between literacy and geography to document how the newspaper provides a venue for inhabitants of the campus and the surrounding area to wrangle over the academic, civic, and regional responsibilities of UCI. The ideological fault lines that emerge are evidence that campus values are, much like the campus itself, an evolving construction to which college writing has much to contribute. I conclude by calling upon teacher-scholars to sustain and diversify the array of literacy practices associated with college campuses by using newspapers and other campus publications for research, pedagogy, and other curricular and cocurricular ends.