Spring blooms in Knoxville and construction cones flower, draping Cumberland Avenue in a vibrant orange – a Vol tradition, it seems.

Not even Ayres Hall, the icon of admissions letters and graduation pictures, could escape the progressive hue. For months, chain fences and orange blockades kept students from the flowers and trees on the Hill, barriers that reflected the perennial red tape and bureaucracy of the graduation process. (Should the ascent to higher learning be so guarded?) Just in time for cap and gown pictures, the construction is complete and new grass grows verdant from the rain – though who knows if it wasn’t greener in the first place?

April bliss drags us from our books to lounge in the Alumni Memorial Amphitheater, a few hundred feet from the half-finished Student Union. The industrious bastion of glass and metal and brick requires an equipment parking lot in the space beneath and around the Pedestrian Walkway. Someday, the sounds of cascading water will designate this area as a “Blueberry Falls” greenway; for now, the stretch of land is filled mainly by the grunts of anonymous construction workers echoing off motionless machines.

Gibbs Hall, the building I turned 20 years old in, was demolished a year after I moved out. For a while the wreckage lingered like a cheese cube leftovers from a funeral, but already it’s cleaned up. From the toothpicks rise a new Hall, one more expensive and advanced than whatever I lived in.

The Torchbearer Plaza and Circle Park; Presidential Courtyard; Strong Hall – each will sport the orange markers of progress, for a time. Society identifies these markers as “construction cones,” because they create a border around the broken and unwanted, signifying that What Is No Longer Good Enough is now the site of What Will Be Much Better.

Our university as we know it is destroying itself “brick by brick” to build itself back up again. Construction cones are as much about destruction as anything else, and for the last four years, UT’s cone zones have been graveyards as much as cribs. There’s a dog named Bonita buried behind the Tyson House, probably the only bones we won’t disturb.

When we return someday as worldly alumni, we will be greeted by something slick and handsome and modern. It will be a stranger university devoid of shameful eye-sores and rich with visitor friendly assets (yet lacking a bowling alley.) The bars we once danced in and the rooms we once learned in will be gone, gone like those they replaced in the never-ending process of college in Knoxville.

And where the landmarks of our memories once stood, we will discover new landmarks – memorials to those who danced and learned here long ago that remind us of the former selves we draped in orange.

Always (yet also, somehow, temporarily) flashing around campus, our orange will remain the same. Not for the football teams who wear it with white, and not for the “branding campaign” that paired it with ideas… No, orange will remain, if nothing else, as a reminder of progress, a school color forever surrounding potholes and bulldozers, a flame that incinerates as well as fuels. UT will always need construction cones.

Orange makes good on the promise of UT Knoxville’s school motto: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” In Knoxville, a place of destruction as much as growth, nothing is sacred in the endless self-analysis of time – not brick and stone buildings or the dreams and tragedies of those who pitter-patter around them. “All is subject to change,” seems to be the song of spring in the cranes and drills. That is the truth we learn, the truth that sets us free from whoever we once were.

But the orange gospel leaves something out – how will we know if we destroy part of our identity that was better left complete? How do we determine if the identity we construct will fade, obsolete?

Maybe I’ll figure out those answers when I graduate from this big, orange country, but for now I’m leaving behind whoever I once was.

And I’m taking a construction cone with me, something tangible from the struggle home.

R.J. Vogt is a senior in College Scholars. He can be reached at [email protected].