Applying organizational theory to higher education – Part III Kirk Greenwood

An ethnographic taxonomization of the constituent cultures of colleges and universities – Center Valley, PA
students, faculty, administrators, alumnae/i October 2021

Cultural anthrpology has identified at least four distinct cultures at U.S. higher education institutions

which interact with one another in variously complementary, adversarial, and apathetic ways:

Student culture • Faculty culture • Administrative culture • Alumnae/i culture

* * *

Student culture: Michael Moffatt’s (1991) ethnographic study of the lifestyles of undergraduates living in a

residence hall at Rutgers University in the late-1970s and mid-1980s emphasized the “pleasurable, autonomous

side of outside-the-classroom college as students experience it,” a lifeworld he termed “college life” (p. 46).

College life describes the ways in which undergraduates spend their time when they are not engaging with the

demands of “‘academics’: professors, grades, requirements, and a bachelor’s degree in four years” (…or longer)

(Moffatt, 1991, pp. 45-6). According to hundreds of 24-hour time reports Moffatt (1991) collected from the

Rutgers undergraduates he queried, the vast majority studied for only two hours a day, while another 25 percent

“hardly studied at all day-to-day, but relied on frenetic cramming around midterms” (p. 47). Students typically

conflated attending class with time spent studying, meaning that from their perspective they dedicated an

average of six hours per day to academic pursuits (Moffatt, 1991, p. 48). The paucity of serious studying

Moffatt observed among Rutgers undergraduates suggests that learning, academic achievement, and even

vocationalism are not primary motivators for students in college. Instead, Moffatt’s (1991) undergraduate

subjects described certain other enticements of the college experience, an experience they attached distinctive

meanings to quite apart from academic achievement and fulfillment. From the students’ point of view:

College is also what goes on outside the classroom, among the students with no adults around. College

is about being on your own, about autonomy, about freedom from authority of adults, however, benign

their intentions. And last but far form least, college is about fun. (Moffatt, 1991, p. 46)

*A taxonomization of four dominant cultures at U.S. colleges and universities based on participant-observer accounts in Manning, K.
(1994). Metaphorical analysis in a constructivist study of college rituals. The Review of Higher Education, 18(1), 45-60, & Moffatt,
M. (1991). College life: Undergraduate culture and higher education. The Journal of Higher Education, 62(1), 44-61.
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Accordingly, the lives of Rutgers undergraduates were focused on “friendly fun with peers” and “spur-of-the-

moment pleasures” that served to counterbalance the more rigorous, scholarly pursuits imposed on them by the

formal curriculum (Moffatt, 1991, p. 47). These student pastimes included:

hanging out in a dorm lounge or elsewhere, gossiping, wrestling and fooling around, thinking up the odd

sophomoric prank, going to dinner or having a light or serious discussion with friends, ordering out for

pizza, visiting other dorms, going to a bar, flirting and other erotic activities, and so forth. (Moffatt,

1991, p. 47)

Such instances of “informal sociability” accounted for more than four hours per day on time reports Moffatt

(1991) received from typical Rutgers undergraduates (p. 48). The fact that Rutgers students dedicated roughly

equal amounts of time to academics and peer socialization suggests that they attached roughly equal importance

to each activity, “with some tilt… toward informal learning [i.e., peer socialization] as the more important of

the two activities” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 59). As Moffatt (1991) observed: “Incoming freshman usually have two

goals for their first year in college, ‘to do well in classes’ and ‘to have fun’ (or ‘to make friends,’ or ‘to have a

good social life’)” (p. 48).

According to Moffatt (1991), Rutgers undergraduates seek fun and friendship in precincts outside what

he called the “official extracurriculum” (p. 51). For despite the existence of “over a hundred a fifty duly

constituted student groups at Rutgers,” of which the average student might participate in one or two, only 10

percent of undergraduates were considered “extracurricularly active” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 51). Moffatt (1991)

hypothesized that the tendency of Rutgers students to eschew organized—and supervised—extracurricular

activities in favor of informal pastimes engaged in with chosen friends derived from the fact that “like other

middle-class Americans, contemporary undergraduates tend to be ‘privatized individualists’ in their most

general cultural orientations, seeking ‘meaningful relationships’ in personal worlds of their own construction”

(p. 52). According to this neoliberal sensibility which had firmly taken root in U.S. society by the mid-1980s,

friends “are the perfect alters for the modern privatized ego – freely and mutually chosen other selves with often

mysterious natural affinities for your own self” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 52). Thus Rutgers students constructed
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“thousands of ever-changing ego-centered friendship networks” which collectively constituted the “social

structure of students’ college life” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 53). Moffatt (1991) cited first-year students, who, within a

month of arriving on Rutgers’ campus, already “considered five or six college acquaintances to be friends or

close friends” and, within two months, could identify “almost one-third of the sixty odd female and male

residents of the same floor as friends or as close friends” (p. 53).

Within zones of near-complete autonomy from adult supervision, insulated by self-chosen friend groups,

undergraduates engaged in sex and partying at historically unprecedented levels. Moffatt (1991) remarked that,

“If relaxed, friendly fun is the private pleasure to which the students devote most of their free time in college,

sexual and erotic fun are the even-more-private pleasures they find most intensely exciting” (p. 54). He found

that “contemporary students seek and engage in much more ‘real sex’” than students of previous generations

(Moffatt, 1991, p. 54). Likewise, students attended parties “centering on loud music and alcohol consumption,

conducted in dorm rooms, fraternities, off-campus bars and apartments” as much to “meet new sexual partners”

or “get in the mood for erotic pleasures” as for the “pure fun of it” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 54). Fraternities and

sororities figured prominently in the social lives of the quarter of Rutgers students who participated in these

organizations, in addition to an estimated 25 percent more who utilized the Greek system for their “wild

partying” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 52). As such, Greek organizations were a salient exception to the general disinterest

shown toward organized extracurricular activities, likely because these organizations were buffered against

adult meddling through “their secret ritual constitutions, their intense peer solidarity, and their private

ownership” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 52). Similar to the way in which undergraduates asserted their autonomy through

self-chosen friend groups and romantic entanglements, Greek organizations “provide undergraduates with a

zone of real autonomy in a group setting of a sort that has not been available elsewhere in undergraduate culture

since the early twentieth century” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 52).

Through friendly fun with peers, sexual experimentation, and partying, then, Rutgers students practiced

a form of unsupervised experiential learning that, at least from their perspective, augmented the formal

instruction they received in the classroom (Moffatt, 1991, p. 48). The students Moffatt (1991) studied perceived
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the college environment as much as a locus for “their late-adolescent pleasure and development as they d[id] as

a place for the formal education purveyed by their professors” (p. 59). Students sometimes referred to the

‘learning’ that took place outside of the classroom in unexpected campus contexts as “‘social learning,’” or a

kind of “informal college learning hav[ing] to do with important ‘life experiences’ which prepare[d] students

for adulthood in the real world as students think of it” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 59). From the students’ perspective,

“learning to take responsibility for their own actions in a big institution where nobody monitors them closely,

learning to cope with university bureaucracy, and learning from their successes and failures in college life”

constituted a crucial part of the developmental process they had to undergo during their college years in order to

become functioning, well-adjusted adults (Moffatt, 1991, p. 59). Ultimately, Rutgers students considered social

learning to be complementary to their formal studies and it was often prioritized in their day-to-day lives.

* * *

Faculty culture: Counterposed to student culture in Moffatt’s (1991) account is a faculty culture that is nearly

as disinterested in teaching undergraduates as the undergraduates themselves are in learning what they

professors have to teach. Either unaware or dismissive of the social learning emphasized by student culture,

faculty culture takes for granted that the purpose of an undergraduate education is “what goes on in the

classroom: learning critical thinking, how to read a text, mathematical and scientific skills, expert appreciation

and technique in the arts, and so on” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 45). Thus, institutional structures compel students to

“submit to adult authority in certain ways – to professors, who give them grades, their fundamental institutional

reward” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 45). To earn satisfactory grades, students have to, at minimum, “sit passively

through scheduled classes,” “learn material the professors think is important,” and generally “meet

‘requirements’” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 49). However, like student culture with its distracted interest in social

learning, faculty culture too has an ulterior reinforcement scheme that draws professors’ attention away from

classroom teaching and from interaction with undergraduates in general, in what amounts to an uncanny parallel

to the academic disengagement of undergraduates. According to Moffatt (1991), “research and publication” is

“what matters most to [faculty] careers and to the most prestigious, grant-producing university agendas” (p. 60).
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Faculty who respond efficaciously to the prevailing ‘publish or perish’ incentive structure are rewarded with

grants, sabbaticals, tenure, promotion, professional advancement, and prestige. This single-minded pursuit of

professionalization, however, causes faculty to lose touch with their responsibility as educators, ending up

“devoting no more than half their time to the undergraduates” in a way that mirrors the lax commitment of

undergraduates toward their academics. Moffatt (1991) contended that a faculty culture of benign neglect

toward its teaching mission is at least partly responsible for students casually “attending classes at whatever rate

suits them to learn what their professors, most of whom are otherwise complete strangers to them, are up to at

the moment,” while frivolously devoting most of their “energy to the pleasures and challenges of college life

and as much extracurricular learning as they desire” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 60). Similarly, Kathleen Manning

(1994), who investigated the constructionist process of meaning-making evoked by college rituals at a “long-

established, single-sex, liberal arts college, considered to be in a vanguard of women’s higher education” noted

faculty’s “limited participation in rituals” intended to engender feelings of community among the college’s

disparate constituencies (p. 45). Whereas students, administrators, and alumnae at the college either joyfully

participated in or endorsed these symbolic enactments of collegiate identity and belonging, faculty remained

almost completely disengaged from campus rituals to the extent that Manning (1994) excluded them from the

sample of respondents she interviewed for her study (p. 48). Moffatt (1991) concluded that “American college

and university professors have been drawing away from undergraduates through increasing professionalization

and specialization for at least a century” (p. 60). He urged faculty to “deprofessionalize as researchers and get

back to teaching and closer contact with undergraduates” as a partial corrective to the academic ennui students

are suffering through and coping with as best they know how (Moffatt, 1991, p. 60).

* * *

Administrative culture: Both Moffatt (1991) and Manning (1994) referenced administrative culture on the

campuses they studied—Moffatt by describing the professional hierarchy which subtends the authority of dean

of students at Rutgers (pp. 49-51) and Manning by incorporating a number of administrators’ perspectives into

her grounded theory analysis of the metaphors used to ascribe meaning to college rituals at an undisclosed New
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England women’s liberal arts college (p. 48). Moffatt (1991) explained that advances in developmental

psychology at the turn of the twentieth century “invented the modern concept of adolescence,” while,

simultaneously, “burgeoning American college administrations invented specialists in college adolescence,

deans of students” (pp. 50-1). Deans of students exercise authority over an “intermediate zone” between the

largely unregulated personal lives of students, which unfold in private spaces such as dorm rooms among self-

chosen friend groups, and the formal curriculum, where faculty set academic standards and evaluate of student

performance with a high degree of discretion (Moffatt, 1991, p. 49). Deans of students and the professional and

paraprofessional staff that support them generally subscribe to notions similar to those of undergraduates that

“college [is] about late-adolescent development” as much as it is about acquiring disciplinary knowledge and

enhancing cognitive skills (Moffatt, 1991, p. 51). However, whereas undergraduates strive to enhance their

autonomy by “revis[ing] their own notions of college life so that it still belong[s] to them, moving its essential

pleasures closer and closer to their private lives” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 51), deans of students and their

functionaries—numbering only 27 professional staff at Rutgers, with responsibility for overseeing about seven

thousand residential students, “a typical ratio for state institutions” in the 1980s, according to Moffatt (1991, p.

49)— establish guardrails around student autonomy in extracurricular and private domains to curb excesses and

maintain safety. For instance, contemporaneous with Moffatt’s (1991) research, Rutgers deans “effectively

pushed drinking out of dorm lounges, into private rooms or off-campus” and ended a sexually degrading

holiday pastime engaged in by students in the residence halls (Moffatt, 1991, p. 50)

Deans of students seek to extend their tentacles of control into autonomous student culture through a

network of hierarchically organized surrogates, including “undergraduate preceptors,” who supervise individual

dorm floors; “graduate student residence counselors,” who supervise whole residence halls; and professional

“area coordinators,” who supervise sets of dorms (Moffatt, 1991, p. 49). Formally organized “[e]xtracurricular

activities are similarly monitored” by agents of the dean or the vice president of student affairs (Moffatt, 1991,

p. 49). These agents include “directors of residence life, directors of student activities, athletic directors and

coaches, musical directors, health specialists, psychological counselors, career counselors, and so on” (Moffatt,
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1991, p. 51). Adult oversight of organized extracurricular activities is a likely contributor to the diminution in

the popularity of these activities among autonomy-seeking undergraduates. Today’s deans and vice presidents

of student affairs preside over an expansive hierarchy of student development specialists; yet, somewhat

ironically, their ultimate recourse is to the “university police, wielding physical force,” whose services are

sought any time the behavior of autonomy-seeking undergraduates turns reckless and results, or could

potentially result, in violations to university policy, property, or the law (Moffatt, 1991, p. 49). In all, student

affairs departments with their highly trained executive administrators, the deans and vice presidents, and their

elaborate personnel structures replete with roles and functions catering to the unique developmental needs of a

range of students, have “inscribed into the bureaucratic organizations of most residential colleges and

universities in the United States” the “peculiarly American notion that higher education is as much about

adolescence as it is about formal learning” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 51).

In addition to enforcing student conduct, academic integrity, and other institutional policies on

independent-minded undergraduates, administrative culture is focused on counteracting the centrifugal forces

that cause undergraduates to disaffiliate with campus-wide communities and withdraw into vortices of

emotionally intense friendships, sexual preoccupations, and excessive partying, displacing their broad

identification with the institution with a solipsistic, exclusionary cliquishness. In Moffatt’s (1991) depiction of

college life at Rutgers, undergraduates tended to enclose themselves in insular friend groups based on obscure

personal affinities and adopt alternately disinterested, skeptical, suspicious, or outright antagonistic attitudes

toward student affairs administrators for perceived infringements to their personal and/or group autonomy.

According to Moffatt (1991), “students live most of their daily lives in college without being aware of or

thinking about the authority of the deans much at all” (pp. 49-50). However, when some provocation forces “the

dean’s power [to be] brought to bear on [students] directly, [they] often rapidly shif[t] from ignoring deans to

imagining them as far more powerful personages than they actually are – stereotypically small-minded, power-

hungry, dictatorial autocrats” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 50). While disagreements between students and administrators

over campus policies are bound to arise at higher education institutions throughout the U.S., the existence of
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adversarial relations between undergraduates and administrators is not a given; in fact, partnerships between

these two constituencies can transform outlooks and rejuvenate campus communities.

Contravening the egoistic, hermetically closed pastimes pursued by undergraduates at large public

research institutions like Rutgers are the officially sponsored rituals that students at the small, single-sex liberal

arts college examined by Manning (1994) enthusiastically participated in. At the college, continuity with the

past and a shared sense of belonging among campus constituents, ranging from first-year students to seasoned

alumnae, are celebrated through ritual. Manning (1994) details the overwhelming support college administrators

accord to campus rituals because they integrally bind together diverse members of the campus community,

notably administrators themselves and alumnae, both of whom tend to be overlooked in events that showcase

the accomplishments of students and faculty. In Manning’s (1994) metaphorical analysis of college rituals,

students at the unnamed women’s college demonstrated loyalty to their institution by participating

unselfconsciously in its defining rituals, including “convocation, the Laurel Chair and Alumnae Parade,

baccalaureate, the Junior Show, graduation, founder’s awards, and Charter Day” (Manning, 1994, p. 4). These

and other rituals mark distinct steps in each student’s progression through their lifecycle as members of a

unique community as “individuals are embraced as newly inducted members of the collegiate community,

seniors are celebrated as college graduates, and rising alumnae assume alumnae status” (Manning, 1994, p. 53).

The metaphor of transformation, one of several Manning’s (1994) respondents used to ascribe meaning to the

rituals, “implies a blending of past, present, and future so that the person one used to be is transformed in the

present to the person she will be in the future” (p. 53).

Such earnest involvement in events formally endorsed by institutional authorities may elicit derision

from the typical Rutgers undergraduate, who is likely to consider such officially sanctioned events

establishmentarian and retrograde. Moffatt (1991) states that at Rutgers, college “traditions are no longer

particularly important among students,” owing to alterations in student consciousness resulting from the cultural

upheaval of the 1960s, which affected public institutions particularly grievously (p. 57). In contradistinction to

Rutgers, however, a multitude of traditions persist at the institution Manning (1994) studied, where they serve
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as means of defining institutional identity, acclimating new members to the campus community, and

maintaining continuity between a storied past, vibrant present, and hopeful future (p. 52). Unlike at the college

Manning (1994) studied, where first-year students “read about the rituals in admissions material” (p. 52), first-

year students at Rutgers are largely uniformed about their campus’ history and culture (Moffatt, 1991, p. 57).

These gaps in their knowledge are readily filled by “contemporary late-adolescent mass culture,” which

promulgates the homogenizing view that “college is about adolescent autonomy…. fun and games: elaborate

pranks, and so forth,” behavioral expectations first-year students internalize and may seek to enact on campus

(Moffatt, 1991, p. 57).

In marked contrast to the way in which Rutgers’ undergraduates tend to fraternize exclusively with

same-age peers, while relating to campus administrators in a formal, impersonal manner, exchanges on the topic

of campus rituals between students, administrators, and alumnae at the women’s liberal arts college in New

England tended to be spontaneous, friendly, and nonhierarchical:

Information about the rituals flowed between first-year students, from sophomores to seniors, from

administrative staff to students, and from younger alumnae to older. Knowledge, meaning, and

interpretation flowed from and in all directions with whomever held the knowledge to whomever needed

it. (Manning, 1994, p. 52)

Even “recent administrative hires with an idea for community building” were encouraged to modify a ritual or

invent a new one (Manning, 1994, p. 52). Rituals thus “provided opportunities to interrelate individual and

communal growth,” values adapted from the college’s mission and “echoing sentiments of community and

leadership linked to high personal achievement” (Manning, 1994, p. 54). Co-participation in campus rituals by

students, administrators, and alumnae engendered a sense of equality among these constituencies which

prompted students to consider “the myriad roles available to them as students, alumnae, and women” (Manning,

1994, p. 54). According to Manning (1994), students, administrators, and alumnae agreed that an important goal

of single-sex tertiary education is to provide students with guidance in how to “‘become a woman’” (p. 54), a

developmental objective that encompassed themes of female empowerment in the view of multiple informants.
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In this vein, the dean of students, spoke of “‘exercising our rights as voters, as thinkers, and as women with

global conscience and a vision of a better world’” during a meeting of the Alumnae Association (p. 55).

Campus rituals fostered nurturing relationships between students, administrators, and alumnae which

Manning (1994) described as “maternal in origin and feminine in practice” (p. 52). According to one alumna

interviewed by the author, “ritual growth and rebirth processes were ‘part of the nurturing that goes on on-

campus’” (Manning, 1994, p. 55). Likewise, a student respondent referred to the college as a “‘sisterhood’”

comprising a continuum of current, former (i.e., alumnae), and future students (Manning, 1994, p. 52). In fact,

Manning’s (1994) study revealed that the college facilitated considerable crossover between students,

administrators, and alumnae over time, with individual community members transitioning from one role to

another [e.g., a student becoming an alumna and employee of the college upon graduation] with eagerness and

ease. Many former students interviewed by Manning (1994) served in leadership positions in either the college

administration or the Alumnae Association, such as “director of general observances” (pp. 50, 54), “secretary of

the college” (p. 51), and “assistant to the dean of students” (p. 55). The fluidity with which individuals

transitioned from student roles to positions of leadership in administrative, advisory, or philanthropic service to

the college suggested a less rigid stratification of student, administrative, and alumnae cultures than that which

existed at Rutgers.

Furthermore, given the degree of mutual antagonism animating relations between student and

administrative cultures at Rutgers, the degree of indulgence Manning (1994) found administrators at the

women’s college show toward the evolution of campus rituals through voluntary or involuntary actions on the

part of student participants was surprising. As a “fluid and adaptable cultural form” enacted through live

performance, and thus subject to “idiosyncratic portrayals, errors, and unintended consequences,” ritual is

amenable to, even inviting of, continual self-renewal (Manning, 1994, p. 50). Comments from administrators

such as the dean of the college chapel and a retired secretary of the college suggested that students were

permitted remarkable latitude in reinventing ritual performances to suit the ever-changing social milieu external

to the institution (Manning, 1994, p. 50). Even more remarkably, this openness to change extended beyond the
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rituals themselves to the very mission and values of the institution that the rituals were supposed merely to

dramatize (Manning, 1994, p. 50). In the words of the retired college secretary interviewed by Manning (1994):

“‘The college has to change in order for it to be at the forefront of the times…. We don’t want it to remain the

same’” (p. 50). The apparent progressivism of this quotation reveals some distinct differences between the

administrative cultures operating at the New England women’s college and Rutgers. The college Manning

(1994) studied appears almost as an anachronism in the early-1990s, at least inasmuch as it seems to have

obviated the complications and controversies brought on by the cultural revolutions of the late-1960s, which

ushered in renewed interest among students in personal and civil autonomy and strained relations between

student and administrative cultures in ways that have yet to be remediated. Perhaps the institution’s small size,

single-sex constitution, the elite demographics from which it draws matriculants, and the deep commitment of

alumnae to role model and mentor current students may have played a role in the campus seemingly being

bypassed by history. Administrators at Rutgers, meanwhile, face the seemingly interminable challenge of

maintaining the safety and discipline of thousands of autonomy-seeking undergraduates, while avoiding

unwarranted intrusion into the statutorily and customarily protected private lives which they enjoy as legal

adults.

* * *

Alumnae/i culture: The forgoing observation about the relative differences in orientations toward student

culture adopted by administrators at the New England women’s college Manning (1994) studied and Rutgers is

not to say that the former institution does not experience its share of internecine tensions. The institution’s

active, influential alumnae culture comes with both advantages and drawbacks in terms of promoting

community, consensus, and cultural coherence. Several of Manning’s (1994) informants addressed the benefits

of having an active alumnae network that engages with students on the basis of campus rituals. For instance, a

retired secretary of the college (Note: I am unsure whether this title, referred to before, denotes an

administrative position within the college or an elected or honorary appellation accorded by the Alumnae

Association) and alumna informed Manning (1994): “Students are able to talk with alumnae and realize that
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they have shared some common experiences because of the traditions…. And the students love to take the

opportunity to talk to the alumnae when they are on campus” (p. 51). Similarly, a junior administrator and

fellow alumna expressed: “You see alums and talk about the same traditions that they went through… [and]

realize that they are important because of the cyclical nature of these traditions” (Manning, 1994, p. 55).

As previously observed, the visibility and participation of alumnae in campus rituals provides as

meaningful sense of continuity between past, present, and future, to which Manning (1994) has ascribed the

metaphors of generation, transformation, and cyclicality, and which in turn can be inspiring and emboldening

for students. Consider the rhetoric of speakers at a ritual concluding the academic year and preparing graduates

for their first tentative steps into the adult world beyond the protective confines of the college gates: “‘You

cannot remain here—the past doesn’t continue,’ ‘when those gates of [the college] swing shut and you are

looking from the outside in…,’ and ‘as you leave the security of your college home….’” (Manning, 1994, p.

53). Manning (1994) glosses these speakers’ remarks by suggesting they invoke tropes that have become

familiar to members of the college community during their long period of acculturation to the essential values

of the institution: “family, home, and the inside/outside dynamic of the college’s gates” are now leveraged to

help graduates “ease the transformation to the next stage of the students’ growth” (p. 53). As a tangible

reminder of the personal and professional successes that await them in adulthood, the presence in the audience

of successful alumnae, the kind of women another of Manning’s (1994) informants declared “‘don’t go on to do

loud, great things but… go on to do quiet, great things’” would certainly reassure and comfort graduates

questioning or faltering in their next steps. Thus, a campus culture which takes seriously the value of

community should be attentive to the input and insight of alumnae/i and consider the positive impact these

accomplished individuals can have on undergraduates.

At the same time, the influence of alumnae/i can sometimes interfere with progressive or egalitarian

impulses that most higher education institutions profess as core to their missions and to the aspirational project

of creating a truly inclusive campus culture. Students at the unnamed women’s college Manning (1994) studied

were instrumental in modifying Convocation through “the content of songs, leadership awards presented, and
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speeches to convey a culturally diverse message” so the event became marginally more inclusive for fellow

students whose cultural backgrounds made them uncomfortable with the overtly Christian form and setting of

the traditional ceremony (Manning, 1991, p. 51). While Manning (1994) does not indicate that the student

reformists were challenged in their efforts, it is easy to imagine a scenario in which such gestures at inclusion

would be met with pushback from a cultural rearguard of alumnae (and possibly even others). In a similar vein,

Manning (1994) observes that colleges and universities can be hidebound institutions where the “reality of

evolutionary change is frequently offset by strong cultural values which strongly affirm ‘the way things are’”

(p. 50). There can be “pressure to keep change at a minimum and to preserve college traditions” advanced by

conservative student groups, overcautious administrators, and persnickety alumnae/i and donors (Manning,

1994, p. 50). To illustrate this point, Manning (1994) includes an anecdote in which a sexagenarian alumna

complained that “those attending the Alumni Parade had to wear white so as not to ‘break the tradition’” (p. 50).

The alumna’s complaint is trivial to the point of constituting a moment of levity in Manning’s (1994) study.

However, insistence on the primacy of tradition even in trivial matters can be linked to potent ideological

arguments on far more consequential issues. As such, it may be best for institutional leaders to accept input

from their alumnae/i advisory boards sparingly and to do so only after consulting with representatives of other

campus constituencies, who may have more mainstream viewpoints on divisive issues.

In the summation of her article, Manning (1994) comments that the metaphors she abstracted from the

qualitative data collected through her interviews with students, administrators, and alumnae at the college (i.e.,

evolution, generation, transformation, revolution, and cyclicality) can clarify institutional mission and “shape

how college members view community” (p. 57). Manning (1994) argues that the “issue of community [is] a

much-heralded but inadequately understood concept in higher education” research and practice (pp. 57-8). Her

respondents “communicated an ardent need to affiliate with others in their community” (Manning, 1994, p. 58);

this need was met capaciously by affiliating students, administrators, and alumnae on the basis of shared

experiences. Such broad-based conceptions of community offer an evocative counterpoint to the insular

friendship networks Moffatt (1991) observed among Rutgers undergraduates. Manning’s (1994) inquiry into
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role of campus rituals in crafting an authentic campus community may be of use to “campuses struggling with

issues of community-building and intellectual rejuvenation” (p. 58). Still, her investigation has limited

generalizability because her analysis focuses on a single (rather idiosyncratic) institutional type. Fundamental

differences of campus size, student demographics, institutional history, and student culture separate a campus

like that Manning (1994) investigated from a large public research institution like Rutgers. It is unlikely that

administrative efforts to refurbish campus rituals that went out of fashion with the arrival of “bluejean-clad,

bearded or long-haired undergraduates, who were making very different sartorial identifications – with a

classless, internationally defined youth culture” (Moffatt, 1991, p. 56) will lead to the reinstatement of a

cohesive campus-wide community at Rutgers or similarly diffuse institutions. The questions that remain are:

What strategies, if any at all, will restore a sense of broad-based community to the public research university?

And, for that matter, is it even worth trying to reinstate a singular, homogenized community at large public

research universities where a diversity of academic interests (some highly specialized) and nonacademic

diversions thrive, along with the enriching potential for inter-/transdisciplinarity and the cross-fertilization of

ideas? How can inter-transdisciplinary collaboration and intellectual cross-fertilization be best fostered on large

diffuse campuses?
 Greenwood 15

References

Manning, K. (1994). Metaphorical analysis in a constructivist study of college rituals. The Review of Higher

Education, 18(1), 45-60.

Moffatt, M. (1991). College life: Undergraduate culture and higher education. The Journal of Higher

Education, 62(1), 44-61.