Note to students at the start of the Fall 2024 Semester: Foster community.
“My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xiii
Aristotle wrote that people have a natural impulse for community. For Aristotle, being together in community is central to “human flourishing” or eudaimonia. The list of people who have written about community since runs from Aristotle and Aquinas, to Danielle Allen and Michael Schur. There are communities of scholars and learners, faith communities, community centers, and community standards. A sitcom called Community is unrelated to the topic, but Chevy Chase was in it, and I’m a fan, so I’m name-checking it here.
Returning to the philosopher Richard Rorty, whose quote opened this missive, community is contingent. People make and sustain community. Community is more than just a bunch of people in the same place at the same time, that's a train station. Community is about coming together with a shared purpose. The purpose can be spiritual and profound, social, academic, or professional. Communities are created and sustained by our participation in them, and they thrive on our commitment to them. Our hostility or ambivalence can kill them. If communities only exist as we participate in them, then it is up to each of us to participate in our communities in ways that sustain - and ideally strengthen - them.
Fostering and sustaining communities takes work. It requires commitment to an idea in which you participate. It involves committing to shared values, listening, acting with empathy, and prioritizing the community’s good over private interests. A community is about the common good, not just the individual experiences of the people in it.
Community isn’t about consensus. It’s about coming together despite differences - or even because of them - to work, share, and support each other. If everyone always agrees with you all of the time you’re not in a community, you’re either being lied to or you’re in a cult.
I am proud to be a member of our SMPA community. It can be frustrating, challenging and exhausting. But far more often than not the SMPA community is energizing, hopeful, supportive, and remarkable. That I get to be part of a larger “we” - one that was here before I got here and that will be here after I’m gone - is a privilege I take seriously.
This fall is why we came to the School of Media and Public Affairs and the George Washington University
We all came to SMPA and GW because this is where the action is. We are home to the best scholars, storytellers, journalists, and advocates around. And we came here for moments like this fall. Washington, DC is the epicenter of global debates about war and peace, about civil rights and social justice, economics, equity, equality, and the environment. And while the presidential and other elections will largely happen outside of DC, this is where those elections are shaped and where their results will play out. SMPA is full of political storm chasers, and this fall is going to be a hurricane. There is no better time or place to study and do journalism, politics and advocacy than in SMPA, at GW, in the fall of 2024.
You belong here
You earned your seat at the table in SMPA (and all the many seats at the many tables at which you will sit during your time here). When you are feeling daunted, when everyone you know seems to have a cooler internship, or somehow magically understands complex concepts and datasets, or gets good grades while also working, having a social life and sleeping (?!), know that you belong here. Your place in SMPA, and heaven knows your worth as a person, isn’t determined by a selfie with a famous pundit or your staff ID. The actor Richard Kind recently told the New York Times that his career has been like a river that widens and narrows, and has now become an ocean. Kind’s view of his career neatly sums up your time as a student in SMPA, and your life after you graduate. Your career will ebb and flow, and you will flourish.
That means the person sitting next to you - even the one with views you find baffling - belongs here too. They earned their seat just as you earned yours. They worked hard and studied, just like you did. They are looking for internships, struggling with big ideas, and trying to have a life and somehow sleep, just like you are. The same is true for your professors and the staff who make it all work. We set a high bar in SMPA, and everyone in SMPA clears that bar. Whenever you think that the person next to you doesn’t belong or doesn't fit, remember that the same people who saw something in you, saw something in them as well.
We are here for the same reasons
We all are here because we think that we can be better, and that we can be better together. In many ways we are, in the words of Richard Rorty, “loyal to a dream country rather than the one to which [we] wake up every morning.” We believe that smart analysis, compelling communication and well-executed strategy can help us understand, and bend, the moral arc of the universe. We are here for the politics, advocacy, truth seeking and truth telling, and the hard work of engaging in our democracy. We are here for big ideas from Aristotle and Cornel West to Lilliana Mason and Celeste Condit, for the data and analysis, and to study, shape and tell stories that matter. And we are here for each other.
Our SMPA community, and the larger community of GW, exists because we believe in the power of community to advance our humanity. Indeed, it is the only thing that can.
Foster our community
As we head into the fall, with all that it will bring to our classrooms and our shared spaces, online, and to the voting booth, lean on and lean into our community. Make your case in ways that make us better together. Listen, encourage, advocate then do it some more. Make our SMPA community, and the larger GW community, places where smart, passionate and committed people debate, advocate, listen, and learn. Who we are and how we show up in classes and the halls, during office hours, at events, and everywhere else we encounter each other, is our community. Our SMPA is us. Let’s foster our community, together.
Peter Loge
Director, School of Media and Public Affairs