The Nature of Community

The word community carries multiple threads of history and associations. It has been used to describe groups as varied as those characterized by physical proximity, those based on religious or political ideologies, those formed around charismatic leaders, even those formed on a temporary basis in classes and workshops. Today in our age of technological and economic interconnectedness we often speak of the “global community” of the world. The word community also carries a connotation of a certain way of being together, one that is often romanticized and often held as an ideal in society. Thomas Moore (1998) in his book, Care of the Soul, argues that one of the strongest needs of the soul is to be in community and that a genuine sense of community is lacking in our society today. What the soul needs is not a collection of uniformity, but to be in connection with multiplicity and difference. Moore goes on to point out that a community is not a family but a group of people held together by a common purpose, shared values, and feelings of belonging.

What is of most interest here is the concept of community as it is applied to higher education. Parker Palmer (1998), the teacher and philosopher of higher education, offers a definition of community as a capacity for relatedness in human beings, relatedness not only to people but to historical events, to the world of ideas, to nature, and to things of the soul. This capacity, says Palmer, is what holds community together. It is rooted, not in therapeutic, civic, or market models of community, but in the very relational nature of reality.

One of the most important qualities of true community, Palmer says, is the capacity for creative conflict. Conflict is the dynamic by which we test our ideas, in a joint effort to move forward, to stretch ourselves and each other. Palmer also says that community is the place where the person you least want to be with lives, and that when that person leaves, someone else quickly arises to take his or her place. Community is not opposed to conflict. Indeed it is exactly the context in which conflict can be held within a compassionate fabric of human caring. Carl Rogers (1980) says that we grope for future forms of community, and that in this time it is especially important to listen to the contrary voices, those that express unpopular or unacceptable views.