Sparks could really fly for those University of Maine residents living in Edith Patch Hall and Doris Twitchell Allen Village if darker smoke billows by way of an oven mishap or a countertop range calamity.

Apparently, the mantra “better safe than sorry” isn’t one touted by the Orono Fire Department when an alarm activation is patched through from Patch or DTAV. Emphasis on conserving resources trumps the slim possibility of a UMaine inferno smoking a handful of upper-hill campus dwellers.

The current fire policy dictates that when a UMaine dormitory alarm goes off, the Orono Fire Department is to send the engine, one of the town’s two ambulances and the ladder truck to the scene.

But a department memo sent out in December 2010 rejects the latter two options in the case of Patch and DTAV, requiring instead that only the engine be dispatched initially.

Of course, a large percentage of the alarms sounding from the Patch and DTAV complexes are made on behalf of nonthreatening, minor infractions — burnt popcorn, overcooked cookies — but all it takes is one roiling, scorching exception before the memo plan dissipates to ash.

If the policy demands a full crew must respond to an alarm incident on campus, then the entire team available should counter the call, period — even if the signal originates from a kitchenette of DTAV or Patch.

It isn’t the fire department’s job to decide whether one incident is more dangerous than another — whenever an alarm goes off, it should be treated as though legitimate danger is imminent and requires all resources at hand.

Following a memo written for the sake of convenience instead of heeding the original call of duty — no matter the location — is a vicious gamble.

One true instance of combustion could claim numerous young lives, and if the OFD arrives half-cocked when a full crew could have been there at the onset, the aftermath is sure to be heavy with the soot of guilt.

Fire can be tricky — it can imply more than is actually there, it can be beautiful, and it can yield many edible delights. But when it is uncontrolled, fire can leave things in complete ruination.

So don’t play with fire, OFD, because one of these days you, along with the people you have sworn to protect, will get burned.

I’ve never seen her beautiful eyes get so big.

“Erin, I see you on the screen!” she’d exclaim with unfeigned excitement, as if she had just witnessed Jesus turn water into wine.

“Can you see me? Can you see me waving at you?”

I’d laugh. “I see you Grammy; you’re looking lovely today!”

Born in 1920, my grandmother witnessed endless technological advancements that continued to astound her in myriad ways.

Even at my age, I find myself recalling past technologies I grew up with, assuming her similar state of awe in regard to where our world is today.

I already live with the fact that I will be explaining VHS tapes and Walkmans to my children, which will surely elicit an expression of bewilderment in conjunction with the “Woah, you’re old” look I used to give my grandmother when I was a child.

“You mean, you didn’t play Oregon Trail, Grammy?”

I never had the heart to tell her that her character usually came down with cholera on the grueling westward journeys anyway.

Oregon Trail, meet smartphones that can see through walls. Meet automobiles whose customized safety electronic systems respond according to your mood.

The time for hunting buffalo — only to settle for the squirrels sporadically jolting across the screen — has long since passed.

As reported by RedOrbit, scientists and engineers from the University of Texas at Dallas have developed new smart phone technology, allowing users to literally see through walls — an advancement they expect to be available for the consumer over the next three to four years.

How exactly does this Clark Kent technology work, one may ask?

Well, envision the electromagnetic spectrum — from radio waves, with the lowest frequency, all the way to gamma rays, with the highest frequency. Nestled in between microwaves and infrared rays is a part of the spectrum called the terahertz band, and researchers have developed a way to transform the electromagnetic waves emitted from this band into actual images. No LSD needed.

The result? Smartphones with an X-ray-like vision. Brick, concrete, clothing, wood, paper and, yes, even those fluffy-white formations of water droplets floating above one’s head are among some of the materials the technology would see through.

Dr. Kenneth O, one of the researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, told RedOrbit: “By far, the medical imaging for cancerous cells will be the most important application.”

One of its many benefits is that terahertz radiation results in significantly less damage to cell DNA and tissues in comparison to X-ray radiation, which is used universally for medical imaging.

Of course, with any new technology, there is a risk of its abuse.

Seeing through clothes? Cancer cells won’t be the only thing getting a thorough examination — not to mention the numerous other privacy concerns that may arise. Although, Dr. O and his colleagues have said their aim is to allow the technology only to work at a distance no greater than 4 inches.

Regardless, my personal space bubble just inflated itself.

Also launching technology into a new age, Toyota Motor Corporation is in the process of developing cutting-edge safety advancements for their cars in the form of a camera that interprets readings from 238 points on a driver’s face to determine their mood.

Research done by the Japanese automaker found that angry or sad drivers are more likely to be distracted while driving, resulting in slower response times to external factors such as crossing pedestrians or a sudden change of lanes by a neighboring car.

Toyota’s system would issue an alert to the driver more rapidly if their expression was identified as angry or sad than it would if their expression was identified as neutral.

This technology may be available to the consumer in as little as six years.

I’m OK with that, as I need sufficient time to digest the fact that my Prius may one day have more insight into my emotions than I do.

It proves horrifying and diametrically extraordinary to contemplate what the technological state of the world will be when I have grandchildren.

Although rapidly advancing technology is not devoid of shortcomings and does indeed necessitate an examination of its ethical implications, the modern Luddites who habitually decry the nature of such advancements neglect the remarkable improvements these technologies offer the fields of health and human safety.

Unequivocally, it proves a tragedy that humans will never cease to find unique and innovative ways to abuse and destroy — and, yes, technology can certainly be the vector. But too often our ability and drive to improve aspects of human life are minimized or overlooked, and that, too, is a tragedy symmetrically unfortunate.

 Erin McCann is a fourth-year biology student. Her columns appeared every Monday.

Fox News and its pundits have recently cried “class warfare” in response to calls addressing the historically low tax rate for the uber rich as a means to fix the country’s growing debt and deficit, despite the fact that the tax system is skewing income distribution upward.

One of the richest men in the country, Warren Buffett, has very publicly created the “Buffett rule” to help out the little guys and gals.

In an August 2011 op-ed in The New York Times, Buffett wrote that he thinks it’s unfair for his secretary to be taxed at a much higher rate than himself because “while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks … my friends have been coddled enough.” Thus, he is demanding the return of the tax rate system that was in place during the 1990s and an end to tax loopholes that allow corporations to avoid paying taxes.

As President Barack Obama has repeatedly said, “It’s not class warfare — it’s math.”

Many conservatives have called for the poorer half of citizens to be squeezed even more, instead of addressing our economic dire, which caused the World Economic Forum to rank the United States as 45th in the world when it comes to income equality.

Yet rightward sources still insist lower-class citizens are the ones who should be paying more in taxes to keep the country afloat. These are the people who they want to pay more while the rich are “coddled.”

According to a conservative estimate made by the 2010 census, 46 million Americans live in poverty. The declining prosperity of the poorest citizens seems even more desolate, given that 45 percent of citizens in the richest country in the world don’t have economic security.

This means nearly half of our citizens live practically, day-to-day, with the whole of their income going to pay for the necessities — food, transportation, housing and medical care — and are unable to save for the future, including for unexpected emergencies, like when a family member gets sick or another loses their job.

The tax system has seemingly been engineered to allow the rich to accumulate more wealth at the expense of the 99 percent. The working man doesn’t have the ability to hire lobbyists or accountants to find ways around paying taxes; his work with sympathetic legislators to decrease their minor tax burden instead.

The tax rate for the rich is the lowest it has been since 1950, which has contributed greatly to our country’s deficit. According to Business Insider, under President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, the top-bracket rate was a staggering 90 percent and we had a period of strong growth.

Growth increased after President Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993 and declined after the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. When Bush and many Republicans talked about tax relief for American citizens, their policy was to give tax breaks to the top 1 percent.

It’s no wonder the United States is in debt after entering two wars without raising revenue to pay for them.

“You have to acknowledge that part of our deficit problem was the huge Bush tax cuts in the early part of the decade,” Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

“What was handed off to the new administration of over a trillion dollars of annual deficit, that accounted for almost half of it,” he said. “If you’re going to be real about the numbers, you’re going to have to address these kinds of things.”

In a recent debate, the Bangor Daily News reported that Maine state Sen. Jonathan Courtney, R-Springvale, said Democrats are playing “class warfare” with the Republicans’ recent bill to give further tax breaks to the top rates, while imposing a TABOR-like vice that has been voted down twice in a popular vote.

Decide for yourself if talking math is class warfare.

Noel Madore is a third-year public management student. He is a member of the College Democrats. His columns appeared on Mondays.

And as a gamer, there’s one news story I see often that never seems to want to die.

I’m talking about the classic, “Did Video Games Breed a Killer?!” news story. They’ve been kicked around popular media outlets constantly, and just recently CNN ran an opinion piece on Anders Behring Breivik, titled “Does the Internet breed killers?”

If you don’t remember Breivik, he is the maniac who massacred children on a rampage last summer in Norway. The game he played? “World of Warcraft.”

I could understand if people linked “Call of Duty” or another first-person shooter game to his killings — one that features guns.

But WoW? It’s a colorful adventure through a massive world with a bunch of other people. You kill a variety of things in it, sure, but most of them aren’t real. And by “real,” I mean on the golem/goblin level of not real.

As a reformed WoW addict, I can assure that the worst thing to ever happen as a result of playing the game is a loss of a social life and occasionally forgetting to eat.

Why does this keep happening? It’s not as though video games are still a small niche market. Gaming used to be the exclusive property of nerds and neckbeards who “lived in their mother’s basement,” but when grandmas are buying over 70 million copies of “Wii Sports,” that image is hard to maintain.

So what’s the deal? I feel like it is only a matter of time until there is a legislative effort against video games similar to the past efforts against heavy metal, a la Tipper Gore.

I can hear the outcry already: “Look at how violent this video game is, I found my 7-year-old son playing this, how could you let this happen?” As if a parent’s own failure to do any research at all and hand a mature-rated game to their kids is the industry’s fault.

If the kid asked for a random magazine you’d never heard of titled “Hot Models Monthly,” would you blindly buy it or maybe at least take a glance at the content?

For any potential or current parents out there who know nothing about video games, here’s a bit of a hint: There are ratings on video games, from E for everyone to AO for adults only. They all have age recommendations. Those are not there for fun.

If you see a game and the box art depicts an angry man holding a weapon and a large array of dead things surrounding him, chances are your impressionable child shouldn’t be playing it.

The label of “gamer” is starting to have its outlines blurred anyway. When you see a high-powered businessman swearing at “Angry Birds” on his iPhone next to an 8-year-old swearing at “Pokémon” on his Nintendo DS, you have to wonder why one is justifiable and one is childish. Facebook has brought a whole cadre of video games to the masses, as anyone who has been spammed by Farmville posts can sympathize with.

Perhaps one day, when everyone in the world has had access to some form of video game or another and the editors of newspapers have actually played a few themselves, maybe this silly story about the Internet breeding killers will finally die off.

Until that day, all gamers will just have to put up with the inevitable onslaught of accusations every time a man playing “Plants vs. Zombies” goes on a rampage.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to play my video games. And all the while I will purposefully continue to not go on a rampage.

Chris Chase is a fourth-year English and journalism student. He is the State Editor for The Maine Campus.

In our first years of college, we’re forced to move away from our homes, which are often in small communities in far-flung places.

Then we’re forced to do more work than ever before. Many students take jobs to stay afloat financially, yet we’re spending more and more of our and our parents’ money to hopefully get jobs in fields we love.

And when you mix those stressors with all-too-common life issues like breakups, troubles at home and difficulty becoming involved in campus activities, it’s no shock that students are struggling.

Doug Johnson, director of the counseling center, told The Maine Campus he’s seeing students come through his doors more and more showing signs of anxiety and depression.

“We do hear it a lot from the students we work with that they feel there’s a lot of pressure on students nowadays,” he said.

A 2010 Maine Youth Suicide Prevention Program fact sheet stated that suicide is the state’s second leading cause of death in youth, a category spanning the ages of 10-25. Though Johnson said college students have proven to be at a lower risk for suicide than the 18-24 demographic that chooses not to go to college, many do strain to adapt to the new environment.

UMaine hasn’t seen the volume of suicides other Maine schools have, something Johnson chalked up to an aggressive community approach to engaging students. He said he doesn’t know of any other UMaine student suicide in the past four years.

According to The Free Press, citing unofficial University of Southern Maine numbers, that university had 13 student suicides between 2007 and 2011.

But in 2009, the university community was impacted when police said Collin Bates, an Orono resident who had stopped taking classes at UMaine, died by suicide.

The local response was great. In 2010, players from the Orono High School football team, which Bates had played on, showed up at the Out of the Darkness Community Walk, an annual event at UMaine aimed at bringing talk of suicide to the forefront of campus attention and community social dialogue.

We can’t be shy about discussing suicide, no matter how much it hurts. We must engage those close to us who may be feeling down and lift them before issues are aggravated.

If you or someone you know are feeling depressed or even suicidal, representatives from UMaine’s Division of Student Affairs and the counseling center are available to provide help. Information on warning signs and contact information for support are available below.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is partnering with Google and Facebook to monitor potentially suicidal behavior online, according to CNN. When one Googles suicide-related topics, the hotline’s number appears; on Facebook, one can report any suicidal content seen or engage suicide prevention specialists in a chat.

TJ’s death doesn’t define his life. Those who knew him must remember him at his most  gregarious.

After all, he’s the one who friend Alex Young described as prone to dance in crowds back home in Rockland. His mother said he was a free spirit, full of vim and vigor.

That’s who he was. Nobody can rewrite that.

Now, we need to take this to heart. Maybe we can find help for the next person considering suicide.

Editor’s Note: The University of Maine’s Counseling Center can be reached at 581-1110. Warning signs for suicide, via the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, can be found here. When school is in session, the University of Maine Police Department offers the services of a 24/7, emergency counselor upon request by calling their dispatch line at 581-4040.

I’m speaking of Tax Day, the day when the federal government sees fit to return some of its citizens’ money to them. This is a perverse celebration of government overreach, an utter reversal of the roles of government and the people. Some brave patriots will refuse to pay their taxes and go to jail for it.

I come to you today with a modest proposal to fight this trend — a proposal in defense of liberty. Liberty means doing something because you choose to, not because you are threatened with force.

Therefore, I suggest that we use our rights as citizens to repeal all taxes, fees and duties imposed by the many governments of the United States.

People will cry out: “What of the poor, who require government aid to survive? What of the children, who are only educated but by the grace of public schooling? What of women and minorities who require affirmative action to get good jobs and education? Most of all, what about communities that need police protection from the ills of drugs and thieves?”

Enough, I say. In a world of perfect liberty, none of these should concern us. What should worry us more is government that deprives us of our right to defensive weaponry, our right to use recreational drugs and seek the services of prostitutes, and exchanges our right to self-determination for prison sentences.

Defenders of government cry out that it provides “essential services” needed for society to function. But if these services are necessary, a market would surely rise up to provide them in the absence of government.

You want to help the poor? I promise you, there is no better feeling than helping others by your own will. You want education? Private schools are seen as bastions of the elite, but this is only because the money parents should be investing in their children’s education goes wasted in taxes. You want jobs for minorities? Give them the chance to create their own firms, rather than forcing them into jobs with employers who don’t want them.

And as for police “protection” — there is a reason the term “police state” is universally seen as derisive. Why should government have a monopoly on force when we are all capable of defending ourselves? In a world of perfect liberty, no one would go to jail for driving too fast, taking drugs or acting in self-defense.

Surely, there will always be deviants who seek to harm others; private security forces and independent arbitrators can sort them out. A well-armed community is a safe community, and we can trust private justices not to exert influence when their kin are involved. After all, when administrators of justice can be fired at any time, there is pressure to act appropriately.

Most of all, what concerns me is government’s desire to rewrite the rules of economic intercourse. Theorists from Friedrich Hayek to Ludwig von Mises have recognized the importance of individual choice in a well-functioning economy.

People today want to tax the rich twice over. They want to raise income taxes on the highest earners so they will bring home an “acceptable” amount of money, and then they want to raise minimum wages to give workers even more of business owners’ money.

This is unjust. The famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty calls out, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” America has always welcomed the poor and hungry from other nations because — unlike today’s bloated, entitled middle class — they value hard work and recognize the sense of accomplishment that comes from earning your living.

A system of voluntary exchange would allow laborers to receive a truly fair wage, whatever business owners could afford to pay them. More people could be hired for less if we didn’t embrace the idea of “distributive justice,” meaning fewer would rely on private charity. Most importantly, workers would truly have to work to earn their wages, and so they would be satisfied in their labor once more.

So, my fellow patriots, I urge you to do what’s right. We must come together to rid ourselves of unjust taxes and unjust government, so we can live in liberty once again.

Mike Emery is a fourth-year sociology student. His political columns have appeared every Thursday.

The site proclaimed to be “pro-ana,” so I did a little research and discovered this meant the website advocated for anorexia or an extremely thin physique.

Popular pro-ana website “PrettyThin” has a page of “Thinspo,” or “Thinspiration,” boasting a picture of a thin woman that reads, “Do it for the bikini,” “Do it for the stares” and other such mantras encouraging anorexia.

Not only does this small corner of the Internet exist, it also began taking over popular social media re-blogging site Pinterest until the site banned Thinspiration’s idea boards.

What is it about these websites that is so disturbing?

Anorexia is not a new trend and, as summer nears, the pressure to be thin is ever-present. The most disturbing aspect of these sites, other than the promotion of an eating disorder, is that women make these sites.

Though anorexia is not just a female phenomenon, the extreme societal pressures on women are mounting as summer nears. Bikini and sundress season, the rise of hem lines: these are reasons why women tend to try and diet and workout more during the months leading up to summer.

However, the difference between a healthy and attainable weight and anorexia becomes blurred as fashion magazines promote stick-thin models, Lady Gaga tweets “Pop Stars Don’t Eat,” designer Karl Lagerfeld is quoted as saying Adele is “a bit too fat” and international fashion runways promote models whose waists are smaller than the circumference of their skull.

Though the media have a large say in what is “trendy” and what is not, magazines with thin models wouldn’t sell if women truly disapproved of the message. What is terrifying about the trend is that women are buying these magazines, creating pro-ana websites and encouraging each other to push themselves to the bodily limits of their frame.

Ninety-one percent of women in college have attempted to control their weight through dieting, cites Walden Behavior Care’s website; 40 percent of women in college actually have an eating disorder, an alarmingly high statistic

Why is this? Eating disorders can rise from the need to have control, societal and social pressures, stress and many other psychological causes. The alarming aid to these pressures is the use of Thinspiration boards on social media sites, pro-ana websites and other literature that promotes anorexia.

Conversely, some companies have started campaigns for “real beauty.” The most notable is Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which touts the mantra: “Imagine a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety.” Such campaigns embrace all figures of women rather than an idealized body type, and also boast non-airbrushed photos.

The website for Dove’s campaign states that only 2 percent of women around the world find themselves beautiful and aims to change that statistic. Getting corporations behind a change is extremely important, as media expose young women to material that could harm their self-confidence. One website, however, may not be enough to end the dangerous trend that eating disorders have become.

What can we do?

As a college community, support is always beneficial. Support individualism and individual body types.

Accept that different really is beautiful, and that developing an eating disorder in order to be thin is not something to be praised.

Help fight the cycle of pressure that is forcing women to become thinner this season and support the healthy lifestyle that truly is beautiful.

Katelyn Melanson is a third-year psychology student. Her columns have appeared every other Thursday.

I won’t lie — at times it has been a bit of a struggle to find things to write about. I hoped that by doing this I would learn more about the nuts and bolts of sustainable management and what neat things people are doing on campus to fulfill our goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2040.

For the most part, though, what I learned was a little bit about a lot of different things because that is what sustainability is: changing the framework of everything all at once. I started with the easy things like transportation, food and waste and I never got around to tackling the more difficult topics of energy use and production, or facilities management — their website is really quite secretive.

My intention was to understand what was motivating campus administrators and what was stopping them from more actively supporting sustainability as an everyday reality on campus. I wanted to help people imagine what a more sustainable campus would actually look like.

Yesterday, I attended the Distinguished Presidential Lecture and Luncheon that was part of President Paul Ferguson’s inauguration week, and the speaker, Gregory G. Johnson, a retired Navy admiral and University of Maine System trustee, gave a very eloquent and entertaining speech about leadership and creating a vision for the University of Maine.

One of my favorite anecdotes was about how to plow a straight line. Rather than looking behind, you need to pick a tall pine on the horizon to aim for. Another tale from his time in the military was about the persistence of culture in determining your results.

As a group of squadrons, he said they consistently performed on a bell curve  — a few groups at the top and bottom and then a whole bunch in the middle — and those that were on the edges stayed there despite attempts to bring in the best people and improve performance. A culture of excellence is hard to create but, fortunately, easy to keep once established.

Admiral Johnson rightly congratulated the University of Maine on instituting first-class programs such as the Sustainable Solutions Initiative and the Climate Change Institute, but I don’t know if the same thing could be said about our efforts to actually be a sustainable community.

It’s not a part of culture; it’s not a real part of our everyday conversation. No one is being asked to even consider changing their choices beyond the lines of “Oh please, please recycle.”

I know administrators are aware of sustainability and have made attempts to integrate it into their work, but it’s hard to see as it’s not connected with the student community in any practical way.

We have a “tall pine” down on paper in our master plan and other statements, but looking around, the idea that we are a community committed to the economic, social and environmental well-being of all its members hasn’t been realized as a way of life.

Ask any student and I doubt sustainability or green living will be in their description of their experience of UMaine. We study it, we go out and enjoy it, but we don’t live it.

If anything, after this year I’m more convinced that sustainability will never be fully achieved because there is always something more you can do — there is more thought, research or work that could be done to bring the community and nature together in a healthy and productive way.

We will never “get there” but we must always be working toward it. I feel like we are intellectually and globally focused on sustainability, but we have stopped working toward it on a personal and local level.

We need to create a culture of living the “Good Life” as the Nearings, early pioneers of the back-to-the-land movement, described it. We can do more to affordably support sustainable options and we are doing a disservice to our students and the reputation of UMaine if we don’t keep heading toward what truly is the tallest pine.

Mackenzie Rawcliffe is a graduate student studying international affairs and public administration. She is the production manager for The Maine Campus.

This is why, even in our age of mobile screens, organizations spend billions of dollars each year promoting physical conferences in London, Phoenix or elsewhere. It is why even digitally pioneering companies such as Apple and Google have literal “campuses” where employees coexist in innovation ecosystems. It is why, in an age in which online education is increasing, old-school, in-person classes are not only relevant but ideal.

I’ve wondered, then, if it would be a financially sound move for universities to pay professors a bonus for living close to campus, or even on campus, where possible. Faculty members who live near campus are likely to spend more time in their offices and elsewhere on site, and to have spontaneous conversations with colleagues and students. They contribute more to the learning community.

Colleges and universities encourage, and some even force, students to live on campus during their freshman and sophomore years or beyond for this same reason. Many universities also provide housing for their presidents or chancellors on school grounds or nearby.

At the University of Maine, many faculty members seem to spend less time on campus than at some other universities. This is probably due in part to the state’s glorious surplus of outdoor activities, as well as the fact that the university’s town, Orono, hosts more expensive property yet fewer people and cultural activities than the city of Bangor, which is about 10 miles away. Partly due to these attractions, The Princeton Review ranks the University of Maine 15th in “Least Accessible Professors.”

UMaine is by no means the only university with difficult-to-snag professors. Academics in general use much of their professional freedom to work away from the office. Every university I’ve ever visited on a Friday is like many a dentist’s office; no one’s around and the doc ain’t in.

What if an institution in the University of Maine’s position paid a housing allowance of, say, $100 a month to faculty who choose to live within three miles of campus? Would the investment be worth it? If it led faculty members to work a few hours more a month on campus and have several more spontaneous conversations with students and colleagues, the policy may be worth the cost.

Additionally, professionals who live a mile or two from work are more likely to walk or bike to campus, burning calories, possibly lowering numbers of sick days and reducing carbon emissions. As a disclosure: I live less than a mile from the University of Maine, so I stand to benefit from a policy that rewards faculty proximity to campus, but I’ll go on the record that I would donate my first year’s stipend to the university’s general scholarship fund.

Better yet, more U.S. campuses could build on-site housing units, marginally subsidize utility costs and rent them to professors, just as they do to keep students close by.

Pepperdine University provides on-campus housing for professors, and its website argues that “[t]he mission of the university is enhanced when a significant number of its students, faculty, and staff are able to live in proximity to one another.”

Like cities and coral reefs, universities function at their highest capacity when there are many organisms milling about and exchanging information in close proximity. Steven Johnson wrote in the book “Where Good Ideas Come From” that “you can create comparable environments [to coral reefs] on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple.” Universities function most like generative ecosystems when students and faculty are attracted to the reef.

I taught for two years at The American University in Cairo, which has a magnificent campus in a growing area known as New Cairo. But the facility is a good hour from the heart of the city. Most faculty members and students live at least 45 minutes away. Professors’ hours are truncated, most students come to campus only on days they have class and the institution is an intellectual ecosystem only in fits and starts.

“Ideas rise in crowds. … They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection,” Johnson wrote. “So if we want to build environments that generate good ideas — whether those environments are in schools or corporations or governments or our own personal lives — we need to keep that history in mind.”

The fact that living near one’s work is a good thing is not revelatory, of course. It’s just common sense. The question is whether universities can identify incentives that keep professors closer to the campus coral and that generate a compelling return. Eduardo Porter wrote in his book “The Price of Everything” that “[m]oving people requires a price.” So does innovation.

Justin D. Martin is the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences-Honors College preceptor of journalism at the University of Maine and a columnist for the Columbia Journalism Review. This piece was first published in The Christian Science Monitor.