Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts

15. “Glowing against the Gray, Sober against the Fire”: Residential Academic Communities in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 15 “Glowing against the Gray, Sober against the Fire” Residential Academic Communities in the Twenty-First Century John M. McCardell Jr. Vice-Chancellor and President, Sewanee: The University of the South The Wall Street Journal published its “millennial edition” on New Year’s Day 2000 with essays about what the future might hold for every sector of American life. One such article had to do with the future of the liberal arts college. “The classroom of the future,” it began, “won’t have much in common with today’s version. For one thing, there probably won’t be a classroom.” The article went on to discuss the ways in which higher education would be changing—would, necessarily , be forced to change. But toward the end came a telling comment. Todd Nelson, then the president of Apollo Group, which started the University of Phoenix, that avatar of distance learning and unbounded classrooms and high technology, when asked where he planned to send his own children to college, responded that of course they would attend a bricks-and-mortar institution. Why? “There are important social and cultural things [there] that you don’t get with us,” he explained.1 Important social and cultural things indeed: human interaction, for one thing; mentorship, for another; as well as conversation, discussion and debate, lifelong friendships, structure, community—none of them virtual, contrived, or simulated. All of them actual, real—perhaps even transforming. Nelson was, of course, referring to “things” that take place outside the classroom and that add comprehensiveness , coherence and, withal, value to the college experience. Of all the reasons behind the tuitions we charge, this added value makes the most compelling claim and explains why, in spite of our escalating sticker prices, the lines at our admissions offices remain long. Clearly, the public also perceives the value-added proposition that constitutes, and has long constituted, the residential liberal arts col- 170 Residential Communities and Social Purpose lege’s reason for being. Residential life, in other words, matters and matters every bit as much as the quality of instruction offered in our classrooms. This summons a well-known quotation, verging on hackneyed, from E. M. Forster’s Howards End: “‘[O]nly connect,’ that was the whole of her sermon. ‘Only connect’ the prose and the passion and both will be exalted. Live in fragments no longer.”2 Could there be a more succinct—or more eloquent—statement about what a liberal arts college seeks to do? It is all about connections, some formulaic, some imaginative, some also serendipitous. Most of us know that quote, and many of us have probably employed it. But the passage that precedes it is less well known yet just as inspiring. It speaks of building a “rainbow bridge” that connects the prose in us with the passion. “Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it, love is born and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.”3 Liberal education, and especially the residential experience, is, or ought to be, that rainbow bridge. Crossing it connects not simply prose and passion but head and heart, hand and eye, adolescence and adulthood. Our campuses are places where young people, not wholly unmade but not yet wholly made, come to continue to learn and to grow. The residential component of the liberal arts college experience is, arguably, the keystone in that bridge. Liberal education, broadly understood, includes the creation and the nurturing of communities of learning. In these residential communities we go about our work of shaping each individual life to ends that are educational, of course, but more—purposeful, informed, loving, selfless, perhaps even (or what’s a heaven for?) noble. Today’s Residential College Experience But before we begin merely to celebrate, by reiteration, the great benefits to be derived from the residential college experience, we need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. We have aged. Times have changed. Our always rather too selfreferential generation, now uncomfortably on the far side of the generation gap, must make the status quo we have created bear at least some burden of proof. We might begin to take Forster’s admonition to heart by considering all the impulses and inclinations to fragmentary living that confront our students daily, routinely. These things are sources of fragmentation and sources also of anxiety. For example, the CIRP freshman surveys have over the years...