Small College Social Pathologies
Today in half-assedly improvised sociology
SteelyKid is in tenth grade this year, which means the whole college application circus is not far off for us as a family. That, combined with what I do for a day job, means I frequently find myself talking to people about different types of colleges.
At one point last week, I was talking with someone about Williams (where I was an undergrad) and Union (where I’ve been teaching since 2001), and made an offhand reference to fraternities and sororities at Union. One of the people I was talking to expressed mild surprise that those still existed in 2023. They do, in fact, still exist, though they’re not as numerous as they were in the past, or quite as socially dominant. They also continue to serve as a catch-all explanation for most social ills on campus, though, at least for a significant segment of the faculty.
As you can probably guess from my phrasing, I’m skeptical about this, in large part because I was a student at Williams in the early 90’s, a quarter-century or so after they eliminated frats (if I recall the chronology correctly, they hadn’t yet gone co-ed yet, so never had sororities). I think this made less difference in the social scene than you might naively expect, because various other organizations (sports teams and clubs) played more or less the same role. There were important differences, to be sure, but in terms of how social events were organized and hosted and the general feel of attending parties, a lot of things were basically the same. You couldn’t be officially denied entry to any particular party, sure, but you don’t need a formal membership structure for people to feel unwelcome at a level where they won’t even try to go.
(I was in a slightly weird place, in that I was a core rugby guy, but was casually friendly with people in a bunch of other social subgroups. I explained it recently to someone as “If I walked into a random party, odds were good somebody there would at least act happy to see me, even if nobody there would’ve cared if I didn’t turn up.”)
And if you look at the things students who are unhappy with the social scene at Union say about it, there’s a pretty clear mapping from there to the complaints made by my Williams contemporaries. The general theme in both cases is a kind of cliquishness: that a small number of groups dominate, and if you don’t fit easily in one of those, social life is hard.
As I was talking about this, something occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about before, which is that this may be largely a problem of scale. That is, both schools are in that standard small-college zone of around 500 students per class, and I wonder if that’s not just a group size that is particularly prone to this kind of issue. It’s a large enough cohort that it’s basically impossible to be personally acquainted with everyone— there were a handful of people at my graduation whose names I swear I had never heard before they crossed the stage— but not so huge that you can’t exhaust the options.
At that scale, it’s entirely possible that for some folks with particular personality types or interest sets, there just won’t be anybody in their cohort that they vibe with. Or the number of people they find compatible might be small enough that things can be readily destroyed— one bad break-up or other kind of falling-out and it’s all over, socially. That more or less guarantees some people will feel lonely and isolated.
Scale things up by a factor of ten, though, and the odds of there being a well-populated comfortable social niche for everyone increase. (Though, of course, the problem of locating the right people becomes more difficult. Which then raises the question of whether there’s an optimum scale…)
This also fits with the common secondary complaint about both campuses that they feel “jock-y,” with a lot of emphasis on sports and related activities. That’s not too surprising as those are activities that necessarily involve being out and about, and that also kind of attract big and demonstrative personalities. It’s hard to avoid those kinds of people, which is a real turn-off for more reserved folks whose interests run in other directions.
Anyway, this is, as I said, a bit of an off-the-cuff elaboration of an idea that just occurred to me. There’s probably some social-science research somewhere relevant to the question of social dynamics at different institutional scales, but I’m not sure where I’d find it and not committed enough to procrastinating on my final grades to invest all that much effort in looking for it…
If you like this kind of thing, but are not in the small group of people who can hang out and talk about it over beers, here’s a button:
And if you know of relevant stuff or just want to call me generally clueless, the comments will be open:
To move this away from the frat issue specifically, I think about this same issue whenever faculty are trying to start an initiative that depends on getting around 10-20 active participants annually on a small campus to be sustainable. Often we look at large universities and say "see? look! they have something just like what we're imagining--a center, a group, a collaboration, a publication--so we know it can work". And what we're missing is that at our scale, we maybe only have 4-5 people keen to be involved like that for almost anything more specialized than "all faculty". Or maybe none, or maybe only 3 people and they're all at different generational points. So yes, I suppose it's so for the students too--finding your people can be hard, and you have to recalibrate your preferences and interests a bit. On the other hand, you're also not lost in a sea of people; you're known and knowable, and maybe find it easier to get to know folks who you didn't think were your people.