I spend a lot of time criticizing conventional education, among other things for failing to live up to its potential and its promises. But this week, I have also been reminded of some of the pleasures of a college campus, because a university is in some sense a universe. (The religious origins of western universities are not incidental.)
I mean that not quite in the way that Clark Kerr meant it in the 1960s when he named the idea of a “multiversity,” an institution that was all things to all people. And I don’t necessarily mean football or gyms, places where individuals can find entertainment or self-care. The “total institution” that Erving Goffman defined, as applied to residential campuses, must include clinics and dining, housing and bureaucracy. But that's not what especially struck me this week.
What I mean, instead, is that we can treat a university, to whatever degree it is self-contained, as a microcosm of society. And like all human societies, perhaps only nascent in foraging societies, it has a multitude of types of inhabitants who often interact.
We can trace their networks or identify roles and org charts, but there’s something else: They can teach us to practice gathering.
Sociologists and anthropologists have spoken about “communitas” (Victor Turner), “collective effervescence” (Emile Durkheim), a “division of labor in society” (also Durkheim), and all these other ways we have tried to indicate that human settlements and organizations have “organic solidarity,” the way organelles in a cell come together to function for the greater good of the hole. Alone, none of them could possibly survive. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies contrasted Gesellschaft (community, sameness) and Gemeinschaft (society, order via laws), and these concepts are useful.
Humans are certainly, necessarily, interdependent and differentiated. This is true of our species. We are born helpless and have a long period of dependency, the longest of all mammals. And even adults, however hermetic they wish to be, generally in all healthy societies that we know, rely on others. We exchange, we depend, and at any moment, any of us may be giving more than we receive, or receiving more than we give, and this kind of moral sharing is the backbone of all functioning communities and societies.
One of the insights here is that societies are made up of individuals with multiple and interlocking interests. The larger the society, the more necessary are norms of behavior. There can be free riders, and there can be inequalities that lead to misbehavior. And individuals, of course, can have their own idiosyncratic challenges. But in general, all human groups intertwine out of necessity.
Universities often talk about community, emphasizing the shared identification with the institution, with school colors, with values and teams. But they might also talk about society, where differentiation-and-interaction is the norm. A little while ago I read Eugene Matusov’s article rejecting the concept of a (self-directed) classroom as a community and instead arguing that it should be a society. I did not truly appreciate the power of this contrast until….just now!
When universities began in the medieval period in Europe (though some versions of institutions of higher learning existed prior to this period and elsewhere) they were sanctuaries and refugees from the broader society, and they were quite exclusive in their membership.
Some contemporary universities maintain that exclusivity to this day through highly competitive admissions procedures, choosing their learners, while other institutions of higher learning, such as the miraculous community colleges in the United States, with their open embrace of all, are not claiming to be exclusive at all.
Many have spoken about administrative creep or blight and the focus on ballooning lavish facilities, and many, including myself, have criticized the outsized role of sport in American higher education, in contrast to most other international universities.
But participating in the life of my institution this week, admittedly, one of the more exclusive ones, I realized that one of the other real opportunities is the possibility of surprise and delight, because a university is a universe, a society. And one of the ways we do the work of being in a society is to gather, and as Priya Parker puts it so beautifully, to do so with art and purpose and intention.
Last Thursday night, on my campus, there was a performance of a remarkable play, called Every Brilliant Thing, an essentially one-person performance but with audience participation. If you have a chance to see this, you should. It was an amazing experience all the way around. The play is by Duncan Macmillan, with Jonny Donahoe, and has been performed all over the world.
I often like to have no knowledge of what I am going to experience, so that I can come to it simply as I am and let the work of art do its magic. And in this case, it certainly did.
The topic is mental health, but art is of course more than just a list of topics. The primary actor selected members of the audience who received certain roles, and the nonce actors really embraced those roles. After the show, which lasted slightly over an hour, there was a post-performance talking session. And it became a kind of therapy session in which people offered something of their own experience.
One person mentioned having at one point been nearly homeless, and had at one low point considered giving up on life. Another person mentioned having had a devastating contrast in their life between the “book version” and the actual version of their life because of an unstable mother, and how this led that person to also nearly give up. One of the people in the audience was a first-year student, on campus only for two weeks, and confessed to having had a little bit of discomfort sitting alone in the front row because none of their friends were willing to come, even though the posters were all over the campus and their dining hall.
We were old and young, Black and white, members of the university and just townies. There was a psychologist, and a pastor, and as I walked out, I learned that one of the chosen actors is actually an actor, and their sibling is a psychologist.
And this struck me—granted it was a self-selected audience, with the means to purchase a ticket and find their way to this location—that it contained quite a variety of people, and in the process of seeing this play, we formed our own mini-society, and in the course of two hours, we truly learned something about and began to care for one another. After the formal post-play conversation, which lasted nearly another hour, ended, many of us went on to talk further, to inquire or comfort or generally learn from others.
This is the power of art.
This is the power of copresence.
This is the power of interacting in a space with all of our diverse preoccupations, and yet showing up to earnestly understand something. We didn’t share an identification with a team; we didn’t sign up to become a club or to undertake a task.
We just arrived, from wherever, and were vividly there for two hours.
Campuses are filled with opportunities like this. Clubs and performances and competitions and demonstrations and lectures and meetings, are advertised everywhere. It is tempting to stick with what we know, which is comfortable. And certainly, the larger the institution, the more necessary it may be to find one’s own people. But given the plenitudes of interests and opportunities, not all of which require financial means—though they do tend to require time—it strikes me that we could do worse than to take this as a call to action:
Check out something new. With others you don't know. But really focus.
Go somewhere you haven’t been before.
Sit next to someone who doesn’t look like you.
Do this in the context of a shared focus and a shared temporal envelope.
And see what happens.
Not selected, not special, just there
Our society as a whole, which shares many of the characteristics of the mini-society, that is any school campus, could also listen to this.
I try to create this in my own courses, with differentiated “jobs” and multiple pathways to learning.
At the end of most semesters, the students in my classes say, just as I did last Thursday night, that the people in the class were really special, and they felt so lucky.
But I’ll tell you a secret: I don't really think they are special.
I think it’s just that we saw each other’s humanity.
Each other’s beautiful personhood.
If you want to call this “souls,” I won’t argue.
At a moment when our notion of “society” is being challenged—from Margaret Thatcher who famously stated in 1987 that there is no such thing (though some argue that her words were taken out of context; here’s the whole transcript), to those destroying any sense of other-regard and shared responsibility and respect—it might be helpful to practice all this in our classes and on our campuses.
If that is the purpose of education, as John Dewey suggested a century ago, in its support for democracy, well then, I’m all in.
We almost always think about education as benefiting the individual students, and it can and must, but it can do more: We can also draw lessons about the nature of the gatherings, which at their best can offer a glimpse of what a world would look like in which we appreciate our interdependence and varied contributions, knowing that without each other, individuals’ lives would be much less magical.
I’m grateful to have spent nearly all my adult life on college campuses, enriched without always knowing why.
(But I’ll continue to be critical, where warranted.)
