Over the last two decades, a large number of studies focusing on self-reported reasons for leaving college have concluded that “belonging” — or rather feelings of not belonging — were to blame. Policymakers pounced on the idea. Belonging became a problem that higher-ed consultants portrayed themselves as ready to solve. Practices to be introduced include fostering friendships and saving seats for classmates. Paper after paper gets written recommending stuff like this.
Is this really what higher education should be about? In revising the contract between institutions and students to deliver belonging on top of education, what burdens are being put on students who are individually uncomfortable with these services — and uninterested in paying for them? In the second Trump term, given Republican skepticism about higher education, we should expect more scrutiny of what universities are subsidized to deliver.
Two social theorists writing during the Civil Rights era offer contrasting frameworks for seeing the potential dangers in aligning educational objectives with feelings of belonging. Erving Goffman analyzed how what he called “civil inattention” enables the productive co-presence of diverse groups in public spaces. Conversely, Hannah Arendt insisted that schools were not public spaces but social, where group differences, associations, and exclusions naturally shape interaction. The tension between impersonal and social approaches to education offers us warnings as faculty members face mounting pressure to engineer student belonging and students’ social future.
This mission creep in higher education — professors are increasingly expected to attend to the personal concerns of every student and even to act as surrogate therapists and parents — represents a curious inversion of the battles fought 60 years ago, when activists and courts established that classrooms should be spaces of civic equality, not reflective of personal preferences. In other words, Goffman’s approach was more expedient than Arendt’s in making the classroom welcoming for everyone, and we are all better for it. What we’ve forgotten, in the rush to make every student feel perpetually supported, is that the impersonal nature of the classroom was itself a hard-won victory for equality.
There are two key distinctions between a classroom space and a nonclassroom space on a college campus. The first is contractual, as the mutual obligations between the institution and student shift distinctly between classroom and casual campus spaces. In the classroom (or lab or lecture hall), the institution commits to providing structured instruction and maintaining an environment conducive to learning, while students are obligated to participate constructively, complete assigned work, and uphold standards of academic integrity. Outside the classroom, the institution’s obligation is a matter of providing safe, accessible facilities that support the broader educational mission, while students maintain their fundamental responsibilities to represent the institution appropriately, adhere to conduct policies, and refrain from actions that could damage its reputation or resources.
The second distinction is social: A classroom space, given institutional obligations to equal access, is a nonsocial space, independent of personal relationships. Two people sitting together may have as little to do with each other as two people sitting next to each other on a bus or a train. They’re not traveling together; they just happen to be taking a similar journey. A nonclassroom campus space, by contrast, is often a social or civic space, where freedom of speech and association prevail. In such a space, if you see two people sitting together you might assume some sort of relationship between them.
A fundamental issue in the legal fight to end segregation in America was whether sitting next to someone in a schoolroom or on public transportation implied a social relationship. It took the Supreme Court to decide, eventually, that it does not. Most people have agreed. On trains and buses, we sit indifferently, practicing Goffman’s “civil inattention” in order to maintain privacy and decorum. The person next to you has nothing to do with you. You nod and turn away. The public space belongs to everyone and to no group in particular.
The tension between impersonal and social approaches to education offers us warnings as faculty members face mounting pressure to engineer student belonging and students’ social future.
Until the late 19th century, you wouldn’t have assumed two people sitting near each other on a public conveyance had a social relationship. “Sitting together” in a vehicle had no social implication beyond the first-, second-, or third-class of the carriage or berth. Ships picked up all shipwreck victims. On land, under common law, a “common carrier” was legally bound to carry any passenger, regardless of race, as long as there was space, the fees were paid, and there were no reasonable grounds to refuse.
But in Jim Crow America, segregationists argued that “sitting together” implied a social relationship: specifically, a relationship of equality. For a state to require “mixing” of races was seen as a violation of the constitutional freedom of association, even while segregation laws prevented even voluntarily sitting together. Anxiety about the possibility that African Americans had “risen” to a place of equality was implicit. The majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) agreed that the law should not impose an intimacy upon individuals by making them sit together, as if that upward mobility had been achieved. “We cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the 14th Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children,” the Court wrote. There should be no forced association either in schools or trains, was the Jim Crow position. That this policy precluded voluntary association across the color line was part of the goal.
American law took a long time to come around to the position that sitting next to someone on a bus, a waiting room, or in the classroom implies no association at all — at most only a civic relationship. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) overturned the requirement that a Black graduate student be seated outside the classroom and apart from others in the cafeteria because it inhibited his ability “to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students.” Earl Warren’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended “separate but equal” segregation altogether, scrupulously avoided any mention of socializing or association.
Instead, Brown v. Board and other education rulings emphasized the importance of discussions and the exchange of views in school and in the education process generally.
We can imagine how newly desegregated and co-ed classrooms needed carefully managed social distance to succeed. Goffman’s sociological framework can help us envision these complex classroom social dynamics. Goffman’s civil inattention in a public space involved brief eye contact followed by looking away so everyone could go on their way without discord. The classroom environment requires a more complex set of negotiations, as students must maintain a level of awareness of their peers that allows them to participate in collective learning activities while avoiding behaviors that might distract or make others uncomfortable, such as staring or flinching. The well-run classroom relies on shared practices of performance and what Gofman called “interaction ritual,” the social and communicative rites whereby we manage one another’s co-presence in public spaces.
By the time students arrive at college they are usually well versed in these standard practices: maintaining appropriate physical distance, modulating voice levels, not making faces, and avoiding prolonged staring. (Pandemic disruptions showed just how vitally important practicing these social performances are.) Students and faculty work together to perform acknowledgment without intimacy, creating spaces where learning can occur without the burden of navigating personal relationships or preferences.
Today’s push to ensure belonging threatens this delicate balance, potentially returning us to an era when social relationships determined access.
Nonsocial, educational spaces are a civic good with positive social utility, which is why Americans fought for their existence. They require self-discipline; a recognition that the space is temporary and for a specific purpose; an agreement to act, therefore, according to customary rules of behavior for the duration; and an obligation to respect the integrity of others present, as long as they adhere to standard practices of respect. These spaces demand a commitment to the greater institutional good in a way that simply asking to belong does not. Anyone who has appreciated the quiet order of a crowded public waiting room understands the fundamental principle of mutual respect at work.
It is instructive to look back at Hannah Arendt’s controversial opposition to the Central High School integration project, on the basis that “school” was in fact primarily social. In “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), Arendt points to “the context of association and social life which invariably develops” on school grounds. High school and college yearbooks document this tendency. High school belongs to the “social sphere,” where hierarchies naturally develop and discrimination “makes sense.” Most importantly, Arendt believed that parents, not students, should be on the front lines of social change. “It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve.” She was not wrong about that.
Nonsocial, educational spaces are a civic good with positive social utility, which is why Americans fought for their existence.
The doctrine of in loco parentis, under which educational institutions acted as surrogate parents, gave colleges and universities broad authority over students’ lives, blurring any distinction between school and public campus space. Before the 1960s, colleges could compel attendance in chapel, impose strict rules of access to men’s and women’s dorms, and ban students from entering taverns outside the gates — matters, that is, of association. You did not choose your seatmate but let the institution choose it for you when you enrolled. Institutionally mandated belonging was the point. Your alma mater guided you and protected you.
But with desegregation, the argument that education was not social required a shift in responsibility. Dixon v. Alabama (1961) established that students could not be expelled for off-campus political activity, effectively ending in loco parentis at public colleges. This landmark case held that a public college could not punish students without at least minimal due process. Following Dixon, Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education (1967) protected the right of college newspapers to be sites of political protest.
These legal changes reflected new goals for American higher ed. The classroom would be reaffirmed as a nonsocial space for academic instruction while the campus would be a microcosm of society where students would learn to engage in classrooms, clubs, and athletic fields with diverse people, perspectives, and ideas. The campus protests of the 1960s called for political and personal activity outside the classroom to be fully permitted. The role of the institution proper was to provide egalitarian, impersonal, educational spaces — including for new academic fields protested into existence, such as Black studies, women’s studies, Native American studies — and then stand back, hands off, as political speech occurred on Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza and elsewhere.
The power of a formal, focused, ritualized classroom space lies in its ability to temporarily suspend the social hierarchies and personal dynamics that can inhibit intellectual risk-taking. A first-generation student can challenge a CEO’s daughter’s interpretation of Marx without navigating social status; a conservative from a rural town can debate climate policy with a liberal from a big city based purely on the merits of their arguments. Like the focused atmosphere of a research library, where strangers sit together in productive silence, the classroom’s impersonal nature is designed as a space where students can shed their social identities and engage purely as minds — making arguments, testing ideas, and even failing publicly without the weight of social dynamics coloring every interaction.
The point of the fight for access to equal education was in part a fight for the institution to get out of students’ lives — their political, personal, and social lives. But the expansion of the American university from a largely segregated environment to a more complex social and educational arena, particularly as more campuses opened to women in the 1970s, would eventually return campuses to the in loco parentis role in a new way. Title IX, which passed in 1972, was initially about ensuring equal athletic opportunities and preventing discrimination in employment and admissions. But two court cases in the 1990s, Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1990) and Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), followed by the (now rescinded) 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights during the Obama administration, expanded the responsibilities of institutions toward students in their care, necessitating a new version of in loco parentis.
Such restored in loco parentis functions have a way of becoming broad policy in a competitive enrollment environment. The chancellor of the California State University system recently proclaimed that the new mission of the largest public higher-education system in the United States is to help students “live fulfilling careers and a fulfilling life.” On both the left and the right, the call is for higher ed not just to be parents again but to be the whole village — the churches, the civic organizations, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, every known community and cultural entity — responsible for raising the next generation both to belong and to be workforce ready, without making clear how these missions are related to each other.
What happens to the locus classicus of mutual obligation, the space of teaching and learning, under this mission? The stakes extend far beyond pedagogical preference. The impersonal classroom represented a hard-won victory for civil rights, creating sacred spaces where students could engage as equals regardless of background or social standing. When institutions pressure faculty to know and nurture every aspect of students’ lives, they ironically risk recreating the very conditions that desegregation aimed to eliminate, spaces where social identity and institutional social engineering overshadow the democratic promise of education itself.
When institutions pressure faculty to know and nurture every aspect of students’ lives, they ironically risk recreating the very conditions that desegregation aimed to eliminate.
In her famous essay, Arendt ignored the classroom, where order seems to have largely prevailed because teachers kept things formal. The task must have been particularly daunting for a teacher of literature or history. The scholarship is surprisingly thin. Graeme Cope’s extraordinary 2011 article, “‘Dedicated People’: Little Rock Central High School’s Teachers During the Integration Crisis of 1957-1958,” is one of the only studies to focus on the classroom rather than the social and public spaces of Central High. Cope suggests that classroom discipline mattered more to whatever educational success there can be said to have been at Central High that year. Outside class, in the cafeteria, stairwells, locker rooms, and playing fields, there was documented trouble. But inside the classroom, order generally prevailed, at least in comparison. Daisy Bates, one of “the Nine,” said at the time, “The Negroes were not bothered in the classrooms.” A white student recalled years later, “There was little interaction with other students in most of my classes. Desks were in straight lines, the teacher taught and we were there to learn.” Apparently at least one teacher took pains with seating arrangements to ensure calm.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, in a 1971 essay about education, argues that it is the faculty member’s job to maintain a separation of the social and the educational. “School” is as not simply a matter of chance encounters, fragments of understanding, moments of unlooked-for enlightenment, but “a serious and orderly initiation into an intellectual, imaginative, moral, and emotional inheritance.” The pedagogical transaction, and the integrity of both teacher and student, are key:
[E]ducation, properly speaking, begins when, upon these casual encounters provoked by the contingencies of moods, upon these fleeting wants and sudden enthusiasm tied to circumstances, there supervenes the deliberate initiation of a newcomer into a human inheritance of sentiments, beliefs, imaginings, understandings and activities. It begins when the transaction becomes “schooling” and when learning becomes learning by study, and not by chance, in conditions of direction and restraint. It begins with the appearance of a teacher with something to impart which is not immediately connected with the current wants or “interests” of the learner.
Oakeshott’s characterization of a teacher’s function in the classroom was the norm for many years and may still assumed by many to be the norm.
Nonsocial classroom spaces need to be reclaimed as the heart of the educational mission of higher ed. As a matter of race, class, gender, first-gen, or any other identity status, everyone belongs equally in a college classroom. The infrastructure to ensure that students are supported and respected, that they are set to have fulfilling careers and live a fulfilling life, is vitally important — but it isn’t higher education. College presidents who are embracing institutional neutrality perhaps recognize neutrality as a kind of widening of the mantle of civil inattention over the whole campus, hinting at a recognition that the primary purpose of universities is educational, not social.
The impersonal classroom isn’t simply a relic of a colder era but rather a sophisticated social achievement that both Goffman’s and Arendt’s analyses help us understand. Through the careful practice of civil inattention, that delicate balance of acknowledgment without intrusion, students and faculty members can create an environment where intellectual exchange flourishes across social boundaries. When institutions pressure the faculty to transform every classroom into a site of belonging and social engagement, like campus spaces outside the classroom, they unwittingly align themselves with Arendt’s view of school as social — but without her clear-eyed recognition that such spaces inevitably develop their own hierarchies and exclusions. The promise of higher education to educate requires maintaining those rare formal spaces where, through the practiced ritual of civil inattention, students can transcend their current social circumstances and engage as intellectual equals. In our rush to make everyone feel perpetually supported on their journey up the social ladder, we risk dismantling the very structures that make genuine social mobility through education possible.
