Finding community - Featured Topic

Liberal Education, Wntr, 2002 by Marsha Guenzler-Stevens

ERNEST BOYER IN Campus Life: In Search of Community wrote: "A college is a human enterprise, and it is more than mere sentiment to suggest that its quality depends upon the heads and hearts of the individuals in it. The goal of educators should be to help students see that they are not only autonomous individuals but also members of a larger community to which they are accountable." As a student affairs educator, my charge is complex: to provide services, to create and maintain spaces where students live and recreate, to partner with faculty in educating the whole student, to participate in the complex governance of an institution, to advocate for students in policy forums and strategic planning sessions, and to lead the charge in the creation of a community of scholars. Perhaps it is the last duty that is the most difficult.

In this era when community seems ever elusive and when our multiple communities define us, the charge to student affairs professionals to create a single institutional community seems most challenging. The past few months have reminded me that community is often not our creation, but it is, on occasion, handed to us in a most unusual package. On September 11, I found myself--like so many others--witnessing the devastation of terrorism in New York City, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon, a site only ten miles southwest of my own campus. When we watched the second plane hit the World Trade Towers, I wasn't prepared to respond to a young graduate student from Bosnia who turned to me and said, "I left a place of war to come to the United States so that I would be safe. What is happening?" I didn't know then that through those horrific moments and the grief, confusion, and uncertainty that would follow, I would find community.

Defining moment

My story is not unusual. Colleagues from colleges and universities across the land faced similar challenges to the crisis. Our institutions of learning, like our sense of innocence, have been forever transformed. On September 11, the afternoon e-mail yielded a letter from President of the University of Maryland C.D. Mote, Jr. Included in his statement was the following, "Never in the course of my life have I had to endure a national crisis of this proportion. The loss of innocent life and national terror induced by our defenselessness has taken on a surreal quality that is far beyond my experience."

We were in our second full week of classes. In the prior week the university had endured the death of a student. As I packed this young man's clothes to send home to his family, I thought: This is the worst this year will hold. Little did I know that in less than six days I would be sitting in a meeting of university administrators attempting to determine if it was safer--both physically and psychologically--to keep our students in class on the day of the attack or to release them to already crowded metropolitan Washington, D.C. highways. Were they safe? Could faculty in classrooms connect with them, not about chemistry, accounting, or Japanese, but about humanity, devastation, and grieving?

At 1:00 p.m. on the afternoon of September 11, I walked into my class of first-year students. We had met only once before. While I had most of their names in my head, I was ill prepared to be their mentor in this crisis. Their faces were stricken. I suggested that we would talk or that they could leave class to find a place or people that helped them to feel safe. They reminded me that they had been on campus for less than ten days and had yet to find that kind of support. We talked about fear: Would we be safe so close to the nation's capital? Why was this happening, what had provoked such hatred? And who would they turn to? In the end, I did what many faculty did that day: I offered to give students a hug--to tell them that somehow or other we would find our way. They lined up for their hugs.

Caring in practice

By noon on September 11, reporters were suggesting that the perpetrators of these acts of terror might be Islamic or Arabic. We were anxious to ensure the safety of our Muslim students and those from Arab nations. The phone lines were down, but on a short-wave radio I asked a colleague to draft an e-mail to the Muslim Student Association. "Come to the Union; we will have prayers. This will be your sanctuary." Within the hour, they came, as did the university police, faculty members, and staff advisors. They would be safe.

In fact, one of the most profound reminders of community would be the conversations I would have throughout the following weeks with Muslim students. They would speak of fear, but they would also commend the institution and its citizens for embracing them. On the twelfth of September, leaders of the Muslim and Jewish student organizations would gather with me for dinner. Groups heretofore on opposite sides of most issues would work to define how we might all know peace--on campus and beyond. Their initial conversation would, one week later, yield a campus-wide dialogue entitled, "We Need Us." It was the first program that these groups had ever planned together. On Thursday of that week, the Muslim students gathered for dinner. We--my colleagues from the health center, human relations, and the university police--were their guests. The police chief gave each student a card with his cell phone number on it and said, "Call me at any time--day or night." We were a caring community.