Nuclear Centers
Eric Miller on Finding Thick Community in the Receding West
Twenty-two years ago, a boy I know well went off to college. It was the age of argyle knee socks and skinny ties, of spikey mullets and tidy perms—a time, in other words, when college students were trying to figure out how to be hip without being hippies. Sting and Thriller filled the air, Cosby and MTV the screen. And the genial pep of Ronald Reagan, contagious in its way, was already making the poor guy the Democrats sent up into a sacrificial lamb, though the election was still two months away.
All of this was the stuff of mystery to this boy. He had been overseas for several years, and had just returned home that summer. John Travolta, flowers, and transistor radios had given way to Boy George, plaid, and boom-boxes. It was all unsettling, in an exciting sort of way, and he was eager to jump in. And he was scared to jump in.
How does one safely enter something as powerful and vast as a culture? From the protection of the family room? Behind the wheel of a car? Inside a mall perhaps, wandering from shop to shop?
A True College
He had ventured into a small Christian college in a semi-suburban, still largely rural part of southeastern Pennsylvania, living on something called a “campus.” This was his primary entry point into that bewildering, indeed, ominous-sounding world of America, 1984. The college was a safe place. His father’s alma mater, it was a beloved place. It was probably just the sort of place that he, at this delicate and critical moment of re-entry, needed.
But unfortunately for him and for the other members of the community, it was also a college that was struggling to map a course for itself in that strange world, a world that was not just bewildering to freshmen, but to the grown-ups, too, and for all kinds of reasons. To attain to the reality of college, after all, is no simple task, whatever the era or age.
To truly be a college requires that the educational community in question possess both social integrity—people living together as humans should—and intellectual integrity—people thinking together as humans should. By taking upon itself the holy responsibility of instructing humans in living and thinking, a college community publicly obligates itself to enact those ideals for which it stands in all aspects of its life: from the way it structures its pay-scale to the way it structures its classrooms, from the attention it gives to its students to the attention it gives to its food preparation.
If it fails at discerning the nature of the good life, or at integrating this understanding into its own life, it will not possess integrity and will look ridiculous—and, indeed, it will be deserving of ridicule. The social and intellectual spheres must come together to form one philosophical, ethical, aesthetic whole: This is what the ideal of college means, and teaches. If the community in question actually comes to embody the most central and elemental human ideals, college is achieved: The name fits.
The particular college community in which the boy found himself was filled with earnest, smart people striving to attain, amid a confusing cultural circumstance, this highly demanding ideal. But their confusion and disorientation were palpable, even to freshmen. Confusion about what it meant to live as a Christian. Confusion about what it meant to live as an American and a Christian. Confusion about the ideas emanating from the broader academy. Confusion about the direction in which the world was moving. And confusion about its own vocation within the church and the world.
Both its social and its intellectual integrity, in short, were under threat. It was struggling to overcome a profound if elusive sense of disorientation. And it was not alone.
Eric Miller is an Associate Professor of History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (www.geneva.edu). He is writing a biography of Christopher Lasch.
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