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The Chronicle of Higher
Education / March 26, 2004
It’s not a glamorous
metaphor, but I'm often tempted to liken my role as a college
president to that of a landlord or small-town mayor. The
constituents may be different, but the contexts are much
the same: thousands of diverse individuals, living and working
in proximity, leading essentially private lives in a communal
setting. That point was driven home to me recently when a
noise dispute between students in adjoining rooms -- neighboring
tenants, so to speak -- helped ignite campus-wide demonstrations
about racism. What seemed a personal conflict between a black
and a white student quickly became symbolic of the college’s
attitude toward race. When people live together in a community,
interactions that are fundamentally private and personal,
the stuff of daily life, are transfigured quickly into public
issues.
Since becoming the top administrator
several years ago at Smith College, a small, private, liberal-arts
institution, I have given a great deal of thought to private
and public space. The history of political protest at my
former institution --the University of California at Berkeley,
where I served as the provost -- has made that institution
almost synonymous with the public staging of issues. The
campus has a flamboyant, often theatrical, tradition of public
debate. Sproul Plaza, the great open space on which the Free
Speech Movement took shape, symbolizes Berkeley. That era
in the campus's history defines an important element of its
culture. Issues get debated, vigorously, in public space.
The private lives of students are almost invisible. Although
Berkeley may occupy an extreme on the political spectrum,
its tradition of public debate is very much part of the culture
of virtually all of our public institutions.
The situation
at most private colleges is quite different. In those residential
enclaves, the private, indeed, predominates. At Smith,
for example, the spaces that most resonantly define the college
for its alumnae -- and often for prospective students --
are the houses, designed to look like family homes, in
which 95 percent of students live. On the one hand, the experience
of living in a relatively small, home-like setting can
create deep institutional loyalty and provide an important
entry point for new students into the campus at large. On
the other hand, intense private communities and their centrality
to institutional identity make it difficult to create public
spaces for robust debate.
I have come to believe that
public space is vital to building a healthy and rich sense
of diversity -- diversity not only in racial and economic
terms, but of political opinion, religious belief, sexual
orientation, and cultural background. Such space provides
an opportunity for people to disagree about matters of political
conviction without personalizing the debate. That is particularly
true at this moment in academic life, when students come
to college steeped in the politics of identity and affiliation,
and suspicious that disagreement could be expressed or received
in anything but personal terms.
In part, public space is
just that: a physical space. Some of the spaces, like Sproul
Plaza, are the product of evolution and tradition. Others,
like the campus center that just opened at Smith, are intentional
attempts to create public space where little existed before.
The building is not a student center but a campus center;
with the exception of the student government, no group
owns any space within it. In designing the building, the
architects envisioned a roofed-over marketplace, a village
square, full of open walkways and gathering spaces, in which
the community could see itself as a community, engaged in
a wide variety of activities. The campus center tries to
create an urban street in a small town.
But public space on
a campus is also, and more pervasively, a function of climate
and mindset. Classrooms and lecture halls are, and should
emphatically be, public spaces in which debate is modeled,
provoked, and complicated -- without threat to one’s feelings or identity. Sadly, the reality is
often very different. As one of my Smith colleagues has observed, “One
can attend a public lecture almost anywhere ... many dealing
with provocative topics, and rarely witness an equally provocative
intellectual challenge from the audience to the ideas that
have been presented. Critical views ... never seem particularly
welcome and always appear a bit out of place.”
It’s often beyond the classroom -- in the dormitory,
in the locker room, in the dining hall -- that the personal
collides with the public. Lacking both expressive space and
rhetorical confidence, many of today’s students freeze
when faced with disagreement. They take it personally -- “You’re
silencing me!” -- or conclude the exchange by apologizing
to their adversary -- “I didn’t mean to hurt
your feelings.”
Such reactions echo closely
the findings of a 1998 study at Grinnell College, in which
students were asked whether it would be possible to discuss
a range of diversity issues like racial difference or multiculturalism
with civility and balance. “The majority of students,” the
survey found, “not only thought that balanced discussion
of these issues was impossible but feared that a single viewpoint
would dominate -- and feared reprisal if one spoke against
that perspective.”
At many institutions, students’ difficulties
with public debate became clear during the Iraq war. Panel
discussions and other campuswide events sometimes became
strongly polarized. Supporters of the war claimed that their
voices were marginalized on predominately liberal campuses.
At Smith, students sponsored forums on the war in their houses,
an important step in opening essentially private space to
public debate. However, they instituted elaborately structured
debate rules -- including balanced representation of all
views and equal clapping for all speakers -- that seemed
to signal their generation's discomfort with principled public
argument.
How we talk about public and
private space is as important as how we create it. When private
colleges produce admission literature replete with metaphors
of family and community, of connection and belonging, it’s not surprising to
find students -- of all backgrounds -- expecting intimate
connection and social ease. When we market student residences
as near-private homes, imitating the structures and functions
of the family, we posit a harmony and bond that probably
doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t, exist. As the
Grinnell researchers aptly observed, “Promising our
students that we will make them comfortable” -- in
this sense, emotionally and psychologically -- “may
simply confirm them in their view that they have the right
not to be challenged.”
While public universities can
learn a good deal from private colleges, the reverse seems
true with respect to recruiting a socially and ethnically
diverse student body and developing a sense of public space.
The dialogue about public responsibility that informs our
public colleges and universities locates these institutions
firmly within public space. Private colleges need to build
a more robust sense of public culture by identifying their
public commitments and exploring their public responsibilities.
In
our public institutions, students feel that they have a right
to belong by virtue of being citizens of their state. Public
charters promise inclusivity. Private colleges define their
student bodies differently. Their desire to build institutional
loyalty leads them to emphasize a more exclusive sense of
belonging. This sense is not always the best starting point
for understanding and embracing diversity as part of the
college’s mission.
The metaphors of family and
community that private colleges so readily use can become
obstacles. A model of diversity that says that our goal is
to create a harmonious and loving unity is not going to succeed.
After all, public arguments with strangers are easier than
family fights. Private colleges need a set of metaphors that
use their own more “familiar” environments
to encourage debate within the context of longer-term relationships.
A model of diversity that acknowledges the possibility of
respect without love, opposition without apology, will take
us far further. We need to imagine a more urban sense of
diversity, one that understands the variety of difference
as the very texture of our lives. To achieve an urban sense
of diversity, we must become more adept at moving from the
private house to public space, where we welcome debate, with
the expectation that strong argument not only affirms belief
but changes it.
Carol T. Christ is president
of Smith College. |
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