No Campus Perimeter

NYU makes a particular kind of sense as a reality television subject because it barely functions as a campus in the traditional sense—the buildings are scattered across Greenwich Village and Lower Manhattan, no gates, no perimeter, just school bleeding into city bleeding into street performance. The students are already half-aware they’re being watched at all times. Put a camera crew in there and you’re not creating conditions for spectacle; you’re just acknowledging conditions that already exist.

The hipster-on-campus premise was perfectly timed. 2011 was approximately peak saturation for the word "hipster" as both identity and insult—the moment when everyone had claimed it, rejected it, and claimed the rejection. What reality television does to self-conscious subjects is interesting: it doesn’t expose them so much as confirm them. The more sincerely someone performs authenticity for a camera, the more the gap between the performance and the thing becomes the actual content. NYU’s particular strain of studied nonchalance would have provided that in abundance, and nobody involved would have been able to stop it.