ethics news & views: BASE strives for living, learning ideal

August 15, 2003

BASE strives for living, learning ideal

By Arri Eisen. I’ve been around universities all my life—my mom and dad taught at one, and I’ve been a student or teacher at one for twenty-two years. What’s become more and more apparent to me is that universities are the best places in the world to be. They’re full of new ideas, weird and wonderful people of all ages, arts, centers, serious stuff, funny stuff, and endless activities for the mind and body.

But what’s also become clearer to me is that all this good stuff rarely overlaps or integrates. And it’s not just because universities can be big and overwhelming: the Emory undergraduate population is just two or three times bigger than my high school. It’s just that people and institutions evolve in a haphazard, busy kind of random mess. The result is that we miss a lot of opportunities for synergy, learning, and just plain cool fun.

Which is why I got together with a bunch of folk at Emory, notably Melissa Snarr of the Center for Ethics and Bobbi Patterson, the fearless leader of the Emory Scholars Program, to hatch a living and learning community idea called Bridging Academics, Service and Ethics. It suggests a home base in which students and faculty can live and learn together, integrating their academic, extracurricular, and other activities in an intentional and ethical fashion (‘intentional’ is a word you start to use a lot, if you spend much time at the Center for Ethics). The idea is to reach a kind of ideal quality of life for students and faculty. This may well be overly ambitious and/or ridiculous, but we feel it’s worth a try.

The plan, although a bit scary on the face of it, is for me and my family to move onto the Clairmont Campus, on the same actual floor as twenty-eight juniors and seniors. The effect on my six-month-old and six-year-old–not to mention on the students and my wife and I–will undoubtedly be interesting, or at least entertaining. We recruited these students from our respective programs to pilot this adventuresome approach. These students are some of Emory’s best and brightest, and include folks from both sexes and a great diversity of backgrounds and interests–folks who are already deeply immersed in the Emory and Atlanta communities.

Clairmont Campus is a beautiful facility to pilot such a program. It includes classroom space, informal and formal eating and meeting areas, beautiful outdoor areas within it and nearby, and comfortable residences.

We met with the students a couple of times last year and began to form some rough plans. The challenge is not to create more to do—to just add more into that haphazard life—but, instead, to streamline and integrate and learn from each other. Some of our ideas include:

Having a yearlong theme that we intellectually explore in great depth, through our classes, and informal and formal meetings, inviting speakers, etc., and then presenting our ‘findings’ to the Emory community at the end of the year.
Having regular informal get-togethers at the new Student Activities Center (SAC) to discuss what we’re doing and where we’re going.
Developing an engaging topic in the fall around which we meet as a formal class in the SAC classroom space in the spring.
Piloting a ‘sustainable community’ in which students would compost, recycle, and be more thoughtful about what they eat and consume and how they live in relation to the earth.

Our hope is that, through this pilot (another similar community in international living also will start on Clairmont campus this fall), Emory can learn what works and what doesn’t and can continue to develop exciting, integrated programs such as this—programs which strive to effectively weave together into vibrant tapestries many of those things that make universities so great.

[ Posted by Arri Eisen at August 15, 2003 10:22 AM |