Community as Commodity

Monday's discussion about "community" and NYU made me see the term in a new light: as commodity. My high school - a small, private, far-from-diverse day school in rural Pennsylvania - advertised itself as a "community" in brochures, billboards and newspaper ads. The Headmaster used the buzz word every time he spoke to students at assemblies, or athletic or theatrical events. The word became so tired that we used to make fun of it - "community this, community that blah blah." Certainly, at a school with 500 students in grades K-12, an overpowering sense of community was an inescapable. Many of the kids with whom I graduated had attended the school since they were 5 years old, and had known each other for more than a decade. Everyone had dated everyone, everyone knew everyone's siblings (many of whom also attended the school), parents, even grandparents. It was highly unusual for a student not to be involved in at least one sport, club or artistic venture.To not feel like a part of the Country Day "community" would have taken far more effort than to actively participate.

As if twelve years of a sheltered, culturally homogenous school weren't enough, most of my graduating class went on to attend small, rural colleges in or near Pennsylvania. Though I only attended Country Day for eight years, I had exceeded my quota of "community." I fled Pennsylvania for New York with the dream of becoming anonymous. I couldn't wait to be in a school with thousands of nameless faces, where I would see and potentially meet new people every day. I have made no attempt, nor do I harbor any desire, to become connected to the NYU community - that is, join a club, sport, organization, student council, sorority, etc. What Monday's discussion made me realize was that perhaps over the course of my time at Country Day I had become desensitized to "community," to such a point that I was deterred by the word. Though their initial intentions might be noble, schools who turn the idea of "community" into a commodity - a selling point - can lose sight of the potentially great ways the term can manifest itself . Schools are (NYU especially so) a business and often market themselves by plugging the school's sense of "community," which especially appeals to people interested in NYU who fear they will be unable to find their niche among thousands of students in a city of millions. But as I have found, and I think others have too, overexposure to the word as commodity rather than as practice has the effect opposite of its meaning - pushing people away rather than bringing them together.