Last Word - Community
This issue of the magazine is about community—the University’s place in the Canton and North Country communities; faculty, staff and student perceptions of community and “place”; the diversity of “communities” which our students find within St. Lawrence; and how faculty and staff are involved in their various local communities. There may be nothing more important for the success of a university that is more difficult to define or achieve. Indeed, one thing often meant by “community” is a commitment to shared values, views or characteristics such that members of a “community” define themselves to others by staking out who “we” are in opposition to who “they” are.
I have always gotten a chuckle when I listen to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion piece on The Loyal Order of the Knutes, Lodge Number 1, Circle Number 7, where he says:
By George we are Knutes. One could do worse! . . . . We know who we are. We are who we are. . . . They’re not comin’ in here! Let ’em start their own lodge!
But “community” within a university is a much more complicated matter. That is partly because one of the values we share involves commitments to “diversity,” including especially the welcoming of a diversity of ideas, perspectives, premises, readings of the evidence—even diversity regarding what “evidence” is and how it should be addressed. Our “community,” then, if it is to be successful at enabling learning to happen, will often be anything but the bucolic, warm and uncritically affirming place that the word “community” often connotes in casual conversation.
Milton, in his Areopagitica: A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England, argues that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently messy: there will of necessity be much conflict of opinion; therefore, tolerance of the views of others is critical. Intellectual conflict within a society is a sign of health. Out of difference comes a larger coherence, a better whole: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”
Another of our shared values, however, is a commitment to conducting our arguing in a way that, in the end, is over ideas, claims and evidence and not about the people who hold those diverse ideas or make perhaps controversial claims. And perhaps our most important job as a liberal arts university is to help students learn how to make better and better judgments about the relative value of competing claims—to teach how the inevitable conflict of opinion that we cultivate in this learning community can avoid becoming ad hominem.
Here I continue to find great nourishment from the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) recent statement on Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility, where one finds observations and encouragements like :
- “In any education of quality, students encounter an abundance of intellectual diversity—new knowledge, different perspectives, competing ideas, and alternative claims of truth. This intellectual diversity is experienced by some students as exciting and challenging, while others are confused and overwhelmed by the complexity.”
- “To develop their own critical judgment, students also need the freedom to express their ideas publicly as well as repeated opportunities to explore a wide range of insights and perspectives. The diversity of the educational community is an important resource to this process; research shows that students are more likely to develop cognitive complexity when they frequently interact with people, views, and experiences that are different from their own.”
- “Learning to form independent judgments further requires that students demonstrate openness to the challenges their ideas may elicit and the willingness to alter their original views in light of new knowledge, evidence, and perspectives.”
- “A good analysis does not simply ignore competing perspectives; rather, it takes them thoughtfully and carefully into account.
When a university is a community, then, its shared values exist at a deeper level—they may not be evident even to a close observer watching day to day because a healthy manifestation of community in our setting is people learning how to manage conflict, sometimes ineptly.
I was greatly pleased to see in the report of our Middle States Re-Accreditation Visiting Team that in conversations with faculty, staff and students throughout the campus there was clarity about our mission and goals. Indeed, the team reported almost identical words used to express what we are about: “This is truly a community united in its understanding of, and support for, the liberal arts.” I believe this clarity of and consensus about mission and goals is essential if the inevitable conflicts in view and perspective I’ve been discussing are to lead the individuals in our community to sounder, more defensible, evidence-based beliefs. Community here, clearly, is quite unlike community among the Knutes, thankfully so!
John Milton: Complete poems and major prose. Ed. M. Y. Hughes, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985.
Board of Directors, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility (Washington, D. C., 2006).
Excerpted with permission from Academic Freedom and Educational Responsibility. Copyright 2006 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
