Fun & Games & Higher Education by Randle W. Nelsen

Author:Randle W. Nelsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC022000, book
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2010-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Community: From the Crowd That Is Lonely to Togetherness and Conformity

In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman, Denney, and Glazer, with their trio of tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed personalities, created types that have since served useful in describing and analyzing social change connecting historical eras and societies. The other-directed theme emphasizing the importance of social acceptance by peers would be taken up a few years later by William H. Whyte in The Organization Man (1956) – a figure whom the author discussed at work in the office and at home in suburbia. Whyte’s concerns about conformity, and about overconformity, were echoed by many sociologists, 1 artists,and songwriters. My favourite among the songwriters remains socialist activist Malvina Reynolds, whose 1962 song “Little Boxes” critiqued suburban sprawl and the lifestyle that often accompanies it. Her lyrics cover everything from suburban housing (“little boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same”) to the university education of the resulting doctors, lawyers, and business executive owners (“they were put in boxes and they all came out just the same”). They cover leisure-time activities (“they all play on the golf course and drink their martinis dry”) and the sameness of the culture passed on to the “pretty” children who reproduce it.

The critique of a particular living arrangement does not deny or alter the need that we all have for community, for communal association. Some twenty years after the Reynolds song was written, movie directors John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus 7, 1980) and Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, 1983) would recall the Woodstock nation by speaking to our need for the togetherness of community in their films. The small screen also speaks to our search for the ties that bind as each year in late January/early February some ninety million viewers gather around their televisions to take in the Super Bowl. This search for community, central to tailgating culture, can also be observed on any and every weekend of the college football season.

Charles R. Frederick’s word picture of the community to be found in The Grove at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford has much in common with the pre-game and post-game celebrations that I observed in Oregon.2 His description of the Rebel Walk, an event that takes place in a part of the country known for its historic and deep racial divisions, focuses on the sense of community it helps promote between the team, the university, and the school’s football fans. The Rebel Walk was started by Billy “Dog” Brewer, who became head coach of the Rebel football team in 1983. According to Frederick, Brewer began the Rebel Walk, a parading event, because he “wanted his players to share in the colorful pre-game atmosphere in The Grove,” the university’s gathering place – a “10-acre patch of heaven” set amongst thick oak, elm, and magnolia.3 As Frederick describes it:

Two hours before the kickoff, Coach Brewer met his team at the athletic dormitory, Kinard Hall, and led them on a leisurely walk through The Grove on their way to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.

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