Tom Wood’s latest installment on residence life and the decline of campus community is so rich in documentation and insights, for example about the dramatic decline in student academic engagement and increase in student substance abuse, that it’s hard to know where to begin.

But the heart of Wood’s argument is that

[r]ogue Res Life programs like the ones that have come to light at U Delaware and U Mass Amherst represent the fissiparous tendencies of modern American life as they are reflected inside the college or university. Absent any vital sense of campus community as an academic enterprise, a vacuum is created in which all the racial and ethnic and political tensions in American life are allowed to play themselves out, in many cases without any counterbalancing force in the form of a respect for academic integrity and the life of the mind. The vacuum is also an open invitation for political activism that fails to respect such norms.

Wood concludes that entropic campus community will hasten major changes in the delivery of higher education:

Maintaining a sense of campus community is a difficult task these days, and getting harder. If the American residential college and university fails to meet the current demands and challenges, it will likely find itself increasingly vulnerable, for economic and socio-cultural reasons, to online, virtual universities that abandon the in loco parentis principle altogether. In such an arrangement, it would be left to students to create their own social and personal connections and environments, both in cyberspace and in the “physical” world … .