I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week I talk with an expert on the health of communities, and how colleges can do more to contribute to their well-being.
Repairing community
We don’t know yet what the country will look like in the wake of the recent election, but Seth Kaplan has a theory about why we are so divided.
Kaplan, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time, argues that social decline in America is happening at the community level, driving depression, anxiety, loneliness, drug addiction, and other ills — even among college students.
“The social decay we are experiencing in neighborhoods is unlike anything I have seen elsewhere — in even the poorest places,” writes Kaplan, who has visited more than 70 countries in his work as a leading expert on fragile states and political transitions at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, where he’s a lecturer.
Kaplan says that our social fabric has to be repaired, not by a top-down effort, but with a “sideways approach,” which knits together community needs, institutions, and organizations tackling a local challenge. Colleges are often key economic and cultural anchors in a neighborhood or city. But are they drivers of community-building? Kaplan shared his thoughts in this interview, which has been edited for clarity and length.
How do you define community versus how is it commonly defined right now?
We’re increasingly defining community in two ways. One, it’s defined as a “sense of community,” or “feeling of community.” Second, it’s been used by companies as pure marketing, particularly in social media. There’s a great need for community, and companies are using our need to sell products.
However, real community is something quite different. Community is place-based and involves repeated interactions between people. You have a common sense of identity and some sort of overarching purpose, something that sustains itself day in and day out. If you’re in a community, people are constantly giving gifts to each other. It’s not transactional. It’s relational. Being in a community means you’re not exclusively living for yourself. It means your relationships are thicker. It’s more interdependent. When you’re in a community, everybody has a role — and that is empowering because most of us feel we don’t have agency.
A good community will always activate people. I have a neighbor who does so many things — she visits people who live alone, organizes the park cleanup, organizes something for nonprofits. There are hundreds of people like her in my neighborhood. I don’t think anyone knows she does these things.
How do you think colleges create that sense of community — or how they undermine it?
Colleges play a really important role because people are there for four years or more. You often form lifetime relationships, so you have an identity, your social ties, a sense of pride. If I listed all the things that make community, a college campus is giving the platform for many of those elements to emerge — but it’s a platform, and different colleges can create greater and lesser senses of community. Some schools, in terms of their orientation and their programming, are doing things that build community.
On the negative side, in the larger picture of the United States, to the extent that colleges are less tied to place than they used to be, they are undermining community. Colleges used to be local or regional, subregional, taking students from those areas. The national competition around prestige means that more colleges are not taking people locally, and graduates are not staying locally, not working to be a part of the local community. If you know the organization Lead for America, that to some extent has been an attempt to reverse the brain drain — for roughly half a century, we’ve had a brain drain from people migrating from about 40 states to fewer than 10 states, and fewer cities. The way many universities work has contributed to that brain drain. Community is about stickiness, interdependence, the giving to each other, not just taking from each other.
We’ve seen a lot of protest on campuses this year. What’s the role of politics when you’re trying to build community?
If it’s centered on politics — and I think too much of our lives are centered on politics — you can’t build community except pretty much against somebody else. That’s a pretty poor idea of community, a negative idea for community. A positive idea of community respects differences — you’re welcome to have your opinion, but you don’t make that opinion greater than the relationship. Communities need to be based on the idea that we’re here to mutually support each other, and if you believe that the relationship is more important than a current political opinion, then you have some red lines on what you’ll do and what you won’t do. Half the country is of another opinion. How can I not have a relationship with those other people? It just blows my mind, to be honest.
I suppose we’ve sorted ourselves to live near people who are more aligned with our views.
We’re much more aligned with people with the same income levels. In fact, I’ll bet if I did a complete scan I would find more neighborhoods with political diversity than I would find with income diversity in America — and that has implications for college campuses, too. But if I’m on a college campus, shouldn’t one of the goals be to practice acceptance of a wide range of differences, including political differences?