Being a recent graduate must really skew my perspective, because when I saw Candace’s excerpt from the new National Association of Scholars article, I was all psyched up to read it and fire off a post about how stupid the idea of “campus community” is. It never even crossed my mind that it could mean, basically, that everyone has to study incredibly hard, so there’s a general atmosphere of scholarliness.
See, where I went to school, “community” meant “the school charges you an ‘activity fee’ and uses it to fund entertainment events. The people who don’t go to these events essentially subsidize those who do. This is OK, because socializing is just as important as studying to the college experience, and if you’re not meeting new people all the time, and becoming part of the ‘community,’ you should pay to do so anyway.” I even publicly complained about how it discriminated against the antisocial.