“Community and Diversity” by Rebekah Nathan focuses on the changing definition of community on college campuses and how this change affects the way students spend their free time and interact with other students. As campus leaders create and promote a campus living community with the good intention of providing every student with engaging activities and helping new students transition from home life to college life, larger communities usually only take away what little free time they have left. during the day and make students feel more isolated and alone. Requiring students to participate in every campus activity in order to form a healthy campus living community distances students from organized groups and makes the formation of small, exclusive social networks even more desirable. Early in his essay “Community and Diversity,” Nathan notes that most students only feel a sense of unity in three areas: “age, pop culture, and a handful of (recent) historical events” ( Nathan 101) – areas that don’t exactly function as ties that bind. Even as campuses devote more resources and energy to trying to engage students and create a functioning community, many students choose instead to set aside time for themselves and small groups of friends, abandoning the large group limited in time for networks of “individualism, spontaneity”. , freedom and choice” (Nathan 105). While these egocentric groups often overlap, they rarely have identical matches, as each student creates their own network based on similar proximities and interests. Many groups are also either composed entirely of a single ethnicity or include only one or two people of different races. Although the vast and organized form of the campus...... middle of paper ...... the purpose and motivation – to provide social structure, to educate or simply to retain the majority of freshmen? While a large-scale community can provide students with multiple activities to fill their days, it simply cannot provide each student with the personal care and attention they so crave. Although Nathan conducts some brilliant observational research in her essay “Community and Diversity,” she only scratches the surface, reporting on the evidence surrounding it, but not getting to the heart of the problem. Today's students need a deeper understanding from other students – an understanding they can't get in a large community. Instead of waiting for small-scale university programs to arrive, students must take matters into their own hands and advocate for themselves and create small, private networks that meet their individual needs...