A professor responds
to Weinberg:
The student life of Colgate University was gutted with the expulsion of
their fraternities.
October 7, 2005, Friday
To the Editor:
Adam Weinberg of Colgate University showcases a minimalist approach to student-affairs programming ("An Alternative to the Campus as Club Med," The Chronicle Review, September 2).
His thesis seems to be that highly structured student-life programming and accommodations deprive students of those teachable moments during which they can create their own networks and communities and thereby solve their own problems.
I posit that the examples cited by Dean Weinberg are, in fact, the antithesis of his theory. The situations he describes are not engendered by students engaged in free association with like-minded individuals. Rather, the minimalist programming appears to be contrived, and perhaps engineered so as to prevent the development of autonomous communities with unique agendas.
On the other hand, the sorts of programming fostered at Colgate and its peer institutions may constitute the best efforts of student-affairs administrators to salvage a campus-life experience for their students. Colgate and other colleges seized their fraternity houses and vanquished the fraternity cultures that had constituted the foundation of campus life for more than a century.
I find it rich to read that colleges like Colgate appear to be scrambling to fill the black hole in student life created by their earlier real estate and housing-market shenanigans. At the same time, it appears that a watchful, if not jaundiced, eye is still cast on the student communities with some semblance of free association.
In Dean Weinberg's paradigm, naturally formed or interest-specific student groups (as opposed to the random assemblage of students cast arbitrarily into residence halls) ought to engage in some predetermined amount of interaction with other similarly formed groups, regardless of any disparity in the interest or focus upon which each group is predicated.
And if it were not so intrinsically tragic, the idea of programmed events on campus at which alcoholic beverages are served would be the joke of the millennium. The removal of alcohol from the campus was one of the pillars upon which colleges like Colgate built their legal arguments for seizure of their fraternity houses.
It appears that Dean Weinberg is engaging in apologetics. The student life of Colgate University and its peer campuses was gutted with the expulsion of their fraternities. The men and women in a fraternity or sorority constitute a natural community with a clear and strong agenda. The members share similar, if not identical, visions, goals, and expectations.
If Colgate had allowed its fraternities to remain extant, the outcome that Dean Weinberg so desperately wants -- students' creating their own networks and communities -- would rise spontaneously, bright, powerful, and bounteous.
Roger R. Festa
Professor of Chemistry
Truman State University
Kirksville, Mo.
Copyright 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education