Does Tufts have a community?

In my fall course, "Introduction to Community Health," students have an early assignment to write about groups that provide them with a sense of community and those that do not. While many students write about subgroups at Tufts, such as clubs, sports teams, sororities, culture houses, etc., that constitute a community for them, I am always struck by how many emphasize that Tufts as a whole is not a community for them. The reasons cited for this have to do with the students' newness to the campus (25 percent of the class is made up of first-year students), a feeling that the campus is too big, or a contentment with their particular subpopulations and a concomitant lack of interest in the larger institution.

I worry about this response, because I have a nagging feeling that we ought to care more about the institutions in which we live our lives, including the ones in which we live, work, worship, and play. But what do I, as a faculty member, do to model the role Tufts plays as a community for me? After all, I can't really be surprised at the students' responses, if I mimic the same behavior. For example, I study tobacco industry behavior, including how it targets various groups of consumers and how it works to control the political agenda at all levels of government. I love this work and find community with tobacco researchers all over the world. Left to my own devices, I suppose I might think I wanted to spend most of my time on this work, resenting anything that drew me away from it, including university service or teaching or advising.

To be honest, however, I pretty much had that life prior to coming to Tufts. And it really wasn't all that great. And when I think about the role of communities in our lives, I can begin to figure out why. I had endless community among tobacco control folk of all types, community-based activists, lobbyists from voluntary agencies, service providers, and other researchers. I had none with the institution where I worked.

We all have groups to which we feel an almost automatic connection. We know, from the first day, that we will invest in them and they in us. It's much harder to reach out to groups that aren't our first choice, or second or third, but sometimes when we do, we find out that, in fact, we can also find community there. I never dreamed when I came to Tufts that I would wait tables for charity or serve on various campus boards or be a first year advisor. But in all of those activities I have found community.

I started thinking about this issue when one of my fellow board members at the Ex College, one of the student members, commented that he had never heard a Tufts faculty member say he or she loved being at Tufts. He also commented that he never saw us dressed in Tufts t-shirts or sweatshirts. I doubt I will start teaching in sweatshirts, but I will say that I love being at Tufts. (There, Dan, I said it.) And part of the reason I am happy to be here is because of the community I have found here.

As I have watched the Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience work its way through ways to create community at Tufts this past academic year, I can't help but wonder how faculty can, do, and probably should help to create this sense of community. How do we model for students that we are committed to larger campus concerns, without necessarily wearing sweatshirts? For me, I know I need to take an occasional break from the tobacco industry and spend time on things that students may care about a little more (although, honestly, people, nothing else is quite as interesting).

So what do I take from this back to my intro class? Well, I guess it's that cynicism is often easy. Giving a damn is sometimes hard. Investing your time and energy in something someone else cares about, as opposed to what you most care about, is often rewarding. And community doesn't always come to you; sometimes you need to go looking for it.