Abstract
What Boyer's vision looks like in practice.
William M. McDonald, editor
240 pp. San Francisco: jossey-Bass (2002), $29.00
PEOPLE ENGAGED IN higher education are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of community as they cope with divisive politics, culture clashes, academic disciplinary feuding, resource competition, and angst over global environmental decay on a daily basis. Some bury their heads in withdrawal. Others lash back by blaming someone else. Still others refuse to fall prey to cynicism and nihilism. The reality is that societies have weathered challenges like these throughout time, helped in part by those, like Ernest Boyer, who rise above the fray. Boyer—scholar, visionary, and optimist—proposed ideas about community that are as relevant today as they were when published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1990 in Campus Life: In Search of Community. His legacy is kept alive in William McDonald and associates’ Creating Campus Community: In Search of Ernest Boyer's Legacy.
The original 1990 Carnegie Foundation publication proposed a model for community building, recommending that campuses concentrate on fostering commitments to purposeful, open, just, disciplined, caring, and celebrative community. In this new publication, McDonald and ten colleagues illuminate, by providing five case studies and another three chapters of general guidance, how such commitments can be used to design comprehensive strategies to support the emergence of community. The examples are derived from a variety of institutions with complex challenges that are all the more compelling because they demonstrate the broad applicability of Boyer's ideas.
It is only fitting that the translation of Boyer's vision into practice is framed between commentary by Parker Palmer. In the foreword, Palmer acknowledges that community is probably contrary to the “individualism, judgmentalism, and competitiveness” (p. x) of the typical academic culture. However, Palmer's description of education as a process that can be responsible for “forming or deforming the human soul” (p. xi) is a chilling warning that community must be one of higher education's primary goals. Not to commit to fostering community risks unhealthy environments that perpetuate disconnected and aloof learning, separated from the problems of a changing world.
The chapters that follow make it clear that there is no one way, or even two or three ways, to approach community building. Betty Moore and Arthur Carter describe how one of the largest campuses and system of campuses in the nation, the Pennsylvania State University, adopted a multifaceted approach to foster greater academic community. By contrast, the Ernest L. Boyer Laboratory for Learning at Carson-Newman College, described by Cathy Brown, J. Mark Brown, and Robert Littleton, was created to serve as a catalyst for students to make connections between their in-class and out-of-class experiences. This affirms the true seamlessness of students’ experiences and emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to community building.
One of the most unusual examples is Jean Bacon's description of the graduate program in student affairs administration at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This program purports to collapse the walls of the campus community by engaging those preparing for student affairs careers in projects that foster civic engagement. Combining the theoretical perspectives from social work with those of student affairs has resulted in a program that addresses individual concerns while at the same time nurturing groups and commitment to a healthy community. Although Bacon reported that this program moves beyond traditional student affairs programs, it is more a refreshing return to student affairs’ philosophical and historical origins.
Many tactics for fostering community are displayed in this collection. Cynthia Wells relates how 2,900-stu-dent Messiah College, Ernest Boyer's alma mater, has assembled an array of community initiatives ranging from a Community Covenant that characterizes the learning environment to rituals such as convocations and candlelight services. One of the most interesting aspects of the Messiah community is the Wittenberg Door on which any member of the campus community can post concerns and questions about the campus, community, or international affairs.
Pennsylvania State University has implemented initiatives designed to deepen student learning, such as service learning and first-year introductory courses as well as involving students in research with faculty. Another commitment was to provide late-night healthy social and recreational opportunities, a strategy designed to support community among those students who reject the illegal and abusive drinking that so often masquerades as collegiate camaraderie. Key to the success of the Carson-Newman project was finding ways to involve faculty, including providing funding resources, allowing faculty to list their participation as service to the college, and providing the opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues.
Process, of course, is an integral part of community building. “An Agenda for Common Caring,” by E. Grady Bogue, conveys the point that caring communities are not void of conflict and strife. In fact, a community without these elements would be more of a pseudo-community. Bogue portrays an authentic caring community as one full of conflicting perspectives and, indeed, so full of complexity that it requires adaptive leadership of the highest caliber.
The experience of Oregon State University described by Larry Roper is most helpful in its description of the change process, not just in the model that eventually unfolded. Roper describes a campus in conflict and with low morale as a result of budget and staffing cuts. To address these issues head-on, he and other staff committed to a principle-based and value-added conversation designed to transform their experience. The most profound outcome of Oregon State's search was “being able to engage in and sustain difficult dialogue” that transformed the institution from a “leader-pushed” into a “value-pulled” organization (p. 89).
In a shift from case study to general applicability, William McDonald provides important assessment strategies to assist initiators of community-building programs. Assessment is a critical and necessary element of improving practice while simultaneously attracting support for its continuation. McDonald also lists seven activities important to success in community building that are gleaned from the case examples: creating clear and elevating goals; personalizing the organization's work; reducing anonymity; agreeing on conversation ground rules; creating opportunities for input, feedback, and reflection; translating aspirations into concrete work; and periodically reviewing organizational progress. These guidelines are useful in charting the progressive move toward and the conditions necessary to build community on a college or university campus.
Boyer's legacy is given new breath in McDonald and his associates’ work. The book is honest in its portrayal of provisional ideas, and it invites engaged experimentation from us all. As Palmer concludes in the afterword, community is most simply and profoundly a “capacity for connectedness.”This concept is captured in five conditions that Palmer proposes as indicative that one is truly part of a community:
I play a meaningful role in a shared educational mission.
I am affirmed for the work I do.
I know that I can take creative risks in my work.
I am trusted with basic information about important issues.
I have a chance to voice my opinion on issues relating to the shared mission or my part of it.
These conditions are straightforward and compelling evidence that community is present. When Boyer's original community values are taken seriously and combined with the learning gleaned from colleagues who have traveled this road before, not only can his legacy be realized, but it can also be extended to transform the sense of community throughout higher education.