Creating community in the college

As things are winding down for me at IU, I took the “Your View. Your IU.” Student Experience at the Research University survey and reflected on my education.
Many of you might not know this because you only know me by my little black and white mugshot and the byline next to it, but I’m a double major in English and theater and drama — which you don’t know because the Indiana Daily Student will let us have only one major in the byline.

Though both of these majors are within the College of Arts and Sciences, they’ve provided me with different enough experiences to have distinct thoughts when I’m asked to “compare” the two like the SERU survey asks.

Both have been strong educations, but I found myself more readily thinking about my theater and drama education whenever there was a question about student life or relationships with professors.

And then I realized, it’s because the Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance is very much on its own. All of those classes are in one building. I can see professors in their offices on the third floor. All graduate students have cubicles in the building and classmates and peers are more centrally located within the building.
All in all, it’s a wonderful sense of community.

And it’s that sense of community because everything exists in one building.
The Department of English is located in Ballantine, but I’ve had English courses in Sycamore Hall, Woodburn Hall, Hutton Honors College and more. I’ve visited graduate student instructors in their offices in Weatherly Hall, which does in fact exist and remains in use. And I’ve generally never felt that strong sense of community that I have with my other major.

The College of Arts and Sciences has never come to the realization that it’s too large. I’ve written about this topic before, and others will write on it again. But the behemoth has taken on 70 degree-granting programs that allows for about 9,000 undergraduate majors to be enrolled in the College.

It’s hard to develop a sense of community within such a large system, but even harder when the College doesn’t seems to realize its girth and how departments must sprawl out all over campus in order to survive.

Especially considering Provost Lauren Robel’s recently released strategic plan, we should spend more time looking at the division of the
College.

In the plan, Robel pushes to “create indelible connections between our undergraduates and our campus” and aims to “support a safe, vibrant and healthy community characterized by a culture of care among and for our students.”

Accomplishing these goals within the College of Arts and Sciences is as easy as making more segmented, centralized departments and making a concerted effort to keep them as such.

Though Robel might be talking about mental and physical health when discussing a “culture of care,” that doesn’t need to solely come from professionals in the Health Center. It can come from having a sense of belonging and support from the peers within your major.

­sjostrow@indiana.edu
@ostrowski_s_j