Here and There and Everywhere

I was really rattled by the deaths of the three students in Chapel Hill last week.  So many details of the story made it breach the distance that stands between me and most of what I read in the news. These young students were members of a community that I loved, and the story had me thinking about why and how I did and do. I'm not from North Carolina, not a Southerner.  I'm not a member of the alumni association, and I don't have a sticker on my car.  I'm not even a basketball fan (!).  None of these are points of pride; they're just observations that my feelings of identification with the University run below the surface, but over the past few days, I've been trying to divine their course.

Carolina was the unlikely (for me, a Yankee) site of my initiation into full adulthood.  It was the place where my youthful interests and impulsive inclinations became acted-upon certainties with some force of their own in my life.  It helped me see academia as a place where I could live, because counter to all stereotypes (perhaps due to its sheer size, but also due to a host of other, more elusive reasons), it was a lot more diverse in pretty much every respect than ultra-liberal Northeastern Swarthmore, especially intellectually.  Even while I endured the sloggier aspects of grad school, I felt . . . hosted . . . by a place of tremendous grace.

Maybe that's why this seems so shocking and sad.  Because for me, what defined Carolina as an institution and what characterized Chapel Hill as a place was not the performance of a basketball team, not the number of Rhodes Scholars nor the vastness of the library's holdings, but the sense that the University existed to welcome everyone into a community of learning.  The camaraderie and generosity that blessed me among the grad students in my program seemed to extend to everyone associated with the institution.  I had this unarticulated sense of having been granted entrance to someplace, of being in possession of full membership, with all rights and privileges, to a place that everyone was proud of.  I didn't feel that all over the South, but I felt it all over campus and everywhere in town.

Maybe because I was in so many ways formed there as a teacher, that vision of education has been completely intertwined with what I feel (not just know or think or believe) as the purpose of higher education.  To confer membership, to create communities of which we can be proud, to welcome.  What happened to those three innocents, whose faces were so full of light, does not make me doubt the work itself; if anything, it means it's even more needed.  But it reminds me that everything we do is situated in what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called "a place to stand and love in for a day . . . with darkness and the death hour rounding it."