I have lived very near and worked on a University campus for four years. Taken together with my undergraduate years, this means that eight of the last ten years of my life have consisted of the pattern of life of higher education. I wanted to muse here on the full effects of that kind of life and the different forms under which I have experienced it.

I often tell others that working and living around a university makes people make sense. Part of any professor’s job is to make a student make sense. The difficulty is that many students cannot make something from nothing. From living around University life, I have found that the first step to imbuing senseless students with what they lack is to impress on them an exterior habit which might impact their interior habits: schedule, decorum, common modes of expression, etc. They must receive some idea of the status quo. The difficulty is that the status quo is only ever a secondary phenomenon. It does not reflect the world into which the student will be deposited after four years but rather the world which the professors, administrators, and staff form both intentionally and unintentionally. There are two systems in every institution, the formal and the informal. Those who excel in one or the other are often rivals and the one who can excel in both is rare. The intentional element of a school results from policy and the informal arises from all aspects taken together, including both failures and successes of policy. So in some sense if a school is truly loved by the majority of its students, I would argue it reflects some kind of reciprocal relationship between the formal policies and informal reactions to policy. Hence if your goal is to make students make sense, it would be best if the formal and informal system make this kind of sense together. The status quo must be a dance of artificial policy and genuine reflection on and response to that policy if it is to help the students make sense. A city is not just its laws, but the culture the laws foster.

Typically, one would expect articles like this one to argue about policy. Much of our time at WCC was spent arguing and complaining about policy because we felt or thought new policies—which were many and frequent—jarred with the informal system which was a response to old policies. Joe Frederickson and I talked May before last about his efforts to cut down a student handbook which had become bloated with policy responses to specific class and student issues: the formal system had grown too large in some attempt to apply categorical rules to non-categorical problems. The difficulty with any college and more intensely with small colleges like ours is the impact each class has on the informal system and hence on the effectiveness of the education and the policies meant to reinforce it. This is the school’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. If a student lands in a good class with a suitable sequence of professors—neither of which are within the control of the school, practically speaking—the education can be excellent. If, however, one lands in a class with a fractured identity, several poorly behaved students (it only takes a few bad apples, etc.), and a dominantly poor temperament for study, no sequence of professors, changes to policy, or modifications to curriculum will significantly improve the outcome. In that case, the only practical solution would be the personal mentoring and friendship between specific professors and students—and this is generally considered inadvisable in academia as well as only likely to help around ten students per class at maximum. Moreover, this sits far outside the bounds of general policy. Having professors open to and suited for this kind of relationship is perhaps something that an institution should wish for, but cannot practically enforce or ensconce within itself as an institution. Hence at WCC the formal and informal systems seem doomed to be in tension with each other, as chance, the admissions team, and the quirks, virtues, and failings of its staff, faculty, and student body ripple into and disrupt the relationship between formal and informal.

At a university, on the other hand, the sharp distinction between the formal and informal is easier to preserve. The institutional elements, by virtue of their sheer size, budge less under any pressure any student, staff member, or faculty member could exert. Students respond accordingly, either reflecting that rigidity in their professional manner and study habits or by throwing themselves against the institution to test its rigidity—staff and faculty do this less often, presumably for economic reasons. At this university, the former can be seen either in actual flippancy toward the institution—blatant rule breaking—or a generalized moral degeneracy, usually in the form of alcoholism or meaningless social engagements. To be clear, both responses to institutional rigidity occur at WCC as well, the difference being that there, at that school and with those people and in that place, the nature of institutional rigidity can appear farcical. The intimacy of the community opens up the possibility that anyone’s behavior—be they student, staff, or faculty—can be dealt with or explained on the grounds of actual virtue or vice, rather than whether they are or are not institutionally permissible. Hence when the school disciplined us, many of us felt they were overstepping and playing the parent. The faculty, in turn, I would imagine, often felt we were offending the institution and/or simply behaving badly. And like dealing with a parent who we feel does not understand us or disciplines us too harshly, many graduates have had to take on a forced distance from their alma mater, one which I have observed is often proclaimed to be freeing but bears all the marks of children wanting a reconciliation that they know is unlikely. Institutions like UD do not have this issue, because the sheer number of professors, staff, and students acts as a screen to any particular student, faculty, or staff member’s struggles or faults. However, this distance also reduces the amount of good the student can gain from the status quo, as they feel screened-off from view such that it need not actually apply to them. In reality, those living within and promoting the status quo still see these students and wish good to them, but feel as though the distance is uncrossable. Hence this gap between student and teacher or staff can be deadening. I fear—I do not know, only fear—that this gap, while providing a kind of tranquility in the personal lives of professors and students less common at smaller schools like WCC, alienates souls in both groups from the real goods of Christian education. But what are those “real” goods? I am not quite sure. I can only point to the real things I had at WCC, so perhaps all I can really say is that some goods of Christian education are incompatible with schools of UD’s size.

The difficulty is that the trade-off is real on both sides. The bitterness and misunderstandings that result from small-town, small-school life are hurts that ache longer than perhaps they should, yet the reality of the things studied is felt in those wounds. Aeschylus says we suffer into truth. Here at UD, were I an undergraduate, I think “suffer” would hold comparatively little meaning. WCC loads the term till it creaks: blisters, sunburn, headaches, thirst, hunger, sore limbs, cold nights and hard ground, icy streams and cold fog, early mornings and late-night homesickness—these are the first things I had at WCC. Yet the truth suffered into feels correspondingly profound. To read and study and discuss and dance after these things is like the clarity and freshness of ordinary things after a fever breaks. I have not seen this even in the brightest students at UD. There is a hesitation and a gravity to the best of the students at WCC. I often think of Dan Spenst’s habit of opening a response to a question by clearing his throat, gazing out toward some point on the horizon, squinting a bit, and beginning with “…Well…”. There is something in his and other exemplary students’ manner at WCC which shows an understanding that the examined life is an ongoing act, a way of life spent in inquiry. Here at UD—and I think this also applies to a large portion of WCC’s less brilliant students—it often feels—though I am sure that many would disagree with me here—that the student post-graduation feels as though they have completed the examination and are now living the examined life: it is not ongoing. It is in the past. They have examined their life, they have selected their justifications and their motivations, and now they will live accordingly. This is true, I think, in regards to one’s Christian life: we often run from the conclusions of our conscience or the Holy Spirit, precisely because they require hard and fast changes and decisions in our lives. But I do not think it applies to the human things: politics, literature, philosophy, and even large swaths of theology are still areas of real inquiry, of examination, of discussing the implications of what Strauss calls the “fundamental alternatives.” That WCC has accomplished this in its best students points to its real seriousness as an educational institution, and the distance inherent in a university often harms the acquisition of this perfection.

Yet, how does this connect back to the life of a university? I think I have indicated here that the difference lies in distance: if you can effectively turn away from, mute, reject, or otherwise create a genuine gap between you and your students, you gain some modern, domestic, and professional tranquility, but lose a degree of perfection at the upper end of your abilities as a teacher. The same goes for staff and students: if you can retreat to your apartment or dorm room and be largely un-beholden to the community or to academic standards, then you have, in effect, capped the potential perfection at what you might think is an acceptable level. WCC’s particular gift is that it can break this glass ceiling by its communal intimacy. The trade off is that some students, staff, and faculty, consequently, get cut, and cuts leave scars. How we deal with that trade-off, I do not quite yet know.