Complete Communities and Indulgent Diversities Essays -- Campus Life

Rebekah Nathan’s â€Å"Community and Diversity† focuses on the changing definition of the word community on college campuses and how that change affects the way students spend their free time and interact with other students. While campus directors set up and promote campus life community with good intentions of providing every student with interesting activities and helping first-time students make the jump from home-life to college-life, big communities usually only take away from the little free time left in the day and make students feel more isolated and alone. The demand on students to participate in every campus activity in order to form a healthy campus life community pushes students further away from organized groups and makes forming small, exclusive social networks even more desirable. At the beginning of her essay â€Å"Community and Diversity,† Nathan notes most students only feel a sense of togetherness in three areas: â€Å"age, pop culture, and a handful of (recent) historical events† (Nathan 101)—areas that do not exactly function as ties that bind. Even as campuses pour more resources and energy into trying to involve students and to create a functioning community, many students instead opt to reserve time for themselves and small groups of friends, forsaking the large, time-restrictive group for networks of â€Å"individualism, spontaneity, freedom, and choice† (Nathan 105). While these egocentric groups often overlap, they rarely have identical matches, as each student creates his or her own network on a basis of proximity and similar interests. Many of the groups are also either entirely comprised of a single ethnicity or include only one or two persons of different races. Although the large, organized form of campus... ...s purpose and motivation—to provide social structure, to educate, or to merely retain the majority of the freshman class? While a large-scale community can provide students with multiple activities with which to fill their days, it simply cannot offer each student much needed personal care and attention. Although Nathan conducts brilliant observational research in her essay, â€Å"Community and Diversity,† she merely scratches the surface of the situation, reporting on the evidence around her, but not reaching the heart of problem. Students today require a deeper understanding from other students—an understanding they cannot have in a large community. Instead of waiting for small-scale university programming to come along, students have to take matters, and their best interests, into their own hands and create small, private networks that cater to their individual needs.