Opening Convocation
September 7, 1999

Lee Cuba
Dean of the College
Wellesley College

Last Friday I had the pleasure of hearing Tim Peltason address the Class of 2003 as part of the orientation program for first year students. Professor Peltason's address focused on the question: Why are we here? In his elegant and complex answer to that question, Professor Peltason challenged us&emdash;not just new students, but all of us gathered there&emdash;to "lose ourselves" in intellectual pursuits, to give ourselves over to the "life of the mind". This is not easily done, he cautioned, but he also held out the promise that doing so was more than worth the difficult work such a challenge demanded. For in losing ourselves in intellectual work, Professor Peltason asserted, we stand to gain a great deal: not only pleasure, but a sense of fulfillment that can only come from experiencing something that is larger than ourselves.

Today I would like to address a different, but nonetheless related question, one that also speaks to our sense of common purpose at Wellesley College: not Why are we here? but What are we here? Or to put is another way: How are we to describe ourselves and our work here together? One common response to that question&emdash;one that I'd wager you've heard many times, even if you are new to Wellesley&emdash;is that we are a community of one sort or another&emdash;the Wellesley College community, the campus community, an intellectual community, a diverse or multicultural community. Indeed, as you know, the concept of community is central to these convocation exercises: From many people, one community.

I'd like for us to reflect for a few moments on the significance of our description of ourselves as a community, and to assert, as Professor Peltason did, that the creation of meaningful forms of community is difficult work, but that it holds out a similar promise of reward&emdash;a sense of belonging to something that is larger than we are, a sense of purpose in our lives and in our relations to others.

Of course, Wellesley College is not the only place where one hears talk of community these days. But it is telling that we hear that term so often as this century comes to a close, for much the same was true at the close of the previous century. Roughly one hundred years ago&emdash;in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century&emdash;the concept of community came to play a major role in how many intellectuals accounted for the dramatic changes in the social landscape they were witness to. In the wake of the industrial revolution, rapid increases in population, and innovations in transportation and communication, the scale of social life was expanding dramatically. As villages gave way to cities, as small-town life was superceded by urbanity, these scholars were sounding an alarm about dramatic changes in the nature and quality of how lives were lived. And it was only a short time before that alarm was echoed in the popular consciousness.

In short, things were changing&emdash;and in ways that were portrayed as decidedly negative. In this country the theme of "the loss of community" was characterized by the valorization of rural, small town life and a corresponding profound sense of anti-urbanism. The loss of community was seen as the source for a variety of social ills: the dissolution of the family, a concern for self-interest rather than collective good, the root of alienation in the workplace.

The concept of community&emdash;and the obsession with its loss&emdash;was one that played a defining role in my discipline of sociology, and within that disciplinary context was most clearly articulated in the work of a German social theorist named Ferdinand Tonnies. Tonnies published a small volume in 1887 entitled Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work that is often translated as Community and Society. In this book Tonnies offer the dichotomous typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as an heuristic device for understanding both the historical development of societies as well as changes in the organization of social life.

In Tonnies' work Gemeinschaft represented a sense of community broadly defined, a world where all relationships are governed by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity over time. Community was premised on what Tonnies called "natural will": ties of kinship, locality, and common beliefs, ideals, and standards for behavior. The world of Gemeinschaft was one of taken-for-granted sameness, a world where it was difficult to mark differences among group members, a world where it was virtually impossible to conceive of oneself apart from others or a specific place. Put simply, Gemeinschaft described a world where you didn't think about community; you simply lived it.

The significance of Tonnies' legacy lies not in the particular historical portrait he painted but in the highly-charged morality with which the idea of community came to be associated. Gemeinschaft was the model of the virtuous life, the place where social interaction was truly meaningful, the source of attachment to something that was larger than the self. Despite the ample evidence we have that life was far less humane than this description of Gemeinschaft would suggest, the valorization of community as the "good life" has persisted. What has not remained equally constant is the way in which we describe&emdash;and seek to construct&emdash;community itself.

In many ways our late 20th century conceptions of community remain evocative of Tonnies' Gemeinschaft&emdash;meaningful associations with others, a sense of group membership and common purpose, and an identity derived from these. But in some very important other ways, our contemporary vision of community is quite different. For example, rather than define community as homogeneous and exclusionary, we now often speak of community not only as welcoming of difference among its members, but also as transformed&emdash;vitalized and strengthened&emdash;by such difference. After all, that is the implicit claim in the theme for this convocation: From many people, one community. Similarly, in a world of easily separable and frequently separated ties of locality, shared territory&emdash;one could argue&emdash;has declined in importance as a necessary condition for community. It's not uncommon to hear the word community used in territorially expansive ways (as in the "global community") or used in ways altogether devoid of territorial constraint (as in "cyberspace communities").

Having said all that, I don't want to leave the impression that commonality and location no longer play central roles in the construction of community. They often do, of course. But whereas in the 19th century bonds of communal solidarity emerged out of the constraints of territory/place, today they must be constructed out of a common purpose, such as:

• when neighborhoods organize themselves to protest the location of a power plant; or
  
  
• when retirees choose to move into age-segregated communities; or (closer to home)
  
  
• when Wellesley College admits and grants degrees only to women.
  

These examples point to the fundamental difference between classical and contemporary understandings of community. Community is no longer something given by birth or location. Rather it is something we seek to achieve, something to be made or constructed. Once community came to be conceived in such terms, it became both variable and problematic. If community was not self-evident or given, then both community itself (the end, or that which we hope to achieve) and the ways we propose to construct community (the means to that end) are open to debate.

Let me illustrate with a somewhat humorous example of this general point, and then conclude by returning to the question I posed a few moments ago: What are we here?

A few weeks ago Diana sent me an article written by an English professor at a large research university. The article was titled "The Way We Live Now" and, in it, the author tells of her dissatisfaction with her life in the university and her "hunger for some emotional or spiritual fulfillment that it doesn't seem to afford. I crave a sense of belonging," she wrote, "the feeling that I'm part of an enterprise larger than myself."

The rest of the article describes this professor's attempts to create community at her university and her reflections on those attempts. With the assistance of a colleague from a different department, this professor invited seven or eight other people from the university to meet to discuss their views of what was missing in their workplace. What happened at these meetings goes to my point about the difficulty of constructing community, so I'd like to read you the English professor's description of those meetings:

None of us, it turned out, had exactly the same idea of what was missing at the university. One person was mainly concerned about women on campus, another had the interests of undergraduate students as a chief responsibility. Both were administrators; they dropped out right away. A third hated his dean and thought that ceremonial occasions honoring distinguished faculty might foster more communal spirit; a fourth represented the interests of special programs administrators who felt marginalized. My partner and I wanted a place where faculty could get a decent cup of coffee and talk to one another. I never figured out what the chemistry professor wanted; he always talked about how lucky we were to be where we were and didn't seem to connect with what other people said. Since we were all from different disciplines, the absence of a shared agenda was fatal. Our busy schedules made it harder and harder to find times when most of us could meet, and so we drifted back to our separate spheres. My friend and I formed a rump group that pursued the coffee initiative into the second semester, but when that ran aground we drifted apart, too. At present, I'm pursing coffee on another front.

I don't wish to suggest that constructing community at Wellesley College is about finding a good cup of coffee (although that would certainly appeal to many of us in Green Hall). But I would claim that there are ample opportunities for us to construct a shared agenda for our lives and our work here together or to be attentive to the structures that shape our collective experience.

When we gather to mourn the passing of one of our faculty, and three days later, gather to welcome and celebrate the arrival of our newest members;

When we agree to commit ourselves to diversifying the student, faculty, and staff populations at Wellesley, and then proceed to disagree about how that diversity is best realized in our interactions with one another;

When we compare the hard work so in evidence at the Ruhlman Conference to the defiant pleasures of Lake Day;

These&emdash;and many other collective moments&emdash;remind us of our common purpose and invite us to think about what community means at Wellesley. Mourning and celebration, agreement and disagreement, hard work and play are all bound up in the messiness of this thing we call community.

As we begin the year, let us then:

• Be attentive to our descriptions of ourselves as a community and the ways in which those descriptions are reflected or not in how we interact with one another;
  
  
• Let us not take for granted that we share a single vision of community or that we share a sense of how that vision can be achieved;
  
  
• Let us remember that community is something constructed, not given, a construction born of both sacrifice and investment, conflict and consensus, individual interests and common purpose; and finally,
  
  
• Let us acknowledge that, as a construction, community must be continually enacted. While community is something we celebrate at moments such as this, it inevitably emerges out of daily practice, manifest in the choices we make and the goals we pursue both individually and collectively.

In recognizing the constructed character of community, Jane Tompkins (the English professor in search of coffee and community) lays the following challenge at our feet: Colleges and universities "should model social excellence as well as personal achievement&emdash;teach, by the very way they conduct their own internal business, something about a dependence upon and need for one another, something about how to achieve the feelings of acceptance and encouragement that community life affords, the sense of self-worth and belonging that keeps us all going on the inside."

That is a challenge well worth taking up, and in doing so, allows us to move from the question "What are we here?" to ask "What might we become?"

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: September 13, 1999
Last Modified: September 14, 1999