By Dan Linehan
ST PETER — Ask a Gustavus Adolphus College student why they chose the school, and they’ll probably tell you it just felt right. They might use words like “clicked,” “meshed” or “friendly.”
Take Chris Duhaime, a sophomore who came to Gustavus without any close friends. It took him only a few months to feel like this was home and by spring semester he was part of a social justice theater group.
“I like to say my home is Gustavus,” he says, not the Twin Cities suburb of Maple Grove where he came from.
Joey Taylor, a first-year student from Washington, Ill., with poofy red sideburns and a cream colored beret, answers that question a bit differently at first.
He was looking for a small liberal arts college with a Russian department. Gustavus fit the bill.
But so did Macalester College in St. Paul.
And Macalester, the alma mater of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, seemed to have a more international flavor, which he liked.
But he describes his reception in that school as “very cold” and “mechanical.”
Taylor admits he didn’t make it into Macalester but says Gustavus was a better fit regardless.
Gustavus Adolphus College and its 2,500 undergraduate students begin the college’s 148th academic year today. All colleges have an orientation process but few do four-day versions that inculcate not only academic values but also a deep sense of the culture of a place.
A captivated audience
Orientation is the last time before graduation that an entire college class will be in one place and have the same shared experience, says Megan Ruble, director of student activities at Gustavus. About 90 percent of new students attend orientation. Many who skip it are athletes who have already been at the school for weeks.
If the college is going to instill a sense of togetherness, community and shared responsibility then this is the best time to do it. The students may be at their most vulnerable emotionally, but at least they have that in common.
The most serious-minded community building exercise happens Sunday evening. It’s a series of skits called E Pluribus Gustavus, a play on “E pluribus unum,” a Latin phrase that appears on U.S. currency meaning “out of many, one.”
As many states made one nation, the many Gustavians make one community. It’s put on by I Am We Are, a social justice theater group.
The evening could easily be a feel-good exercise that ties the students together based on positive, shared values.
But suffering is the more scenic route. Actors put on a series of skits about rape, social isolation, racism, homophobia and suicide. Everything in the skit has happened on the campus to an actor or a close friend.
Sometimes it’s funny.
“I’m so white, multi-grain bread makes me nervous,” says an actor in a skit about a white man wanting to be racially, culturally and sexually sensitive but afraid he’ll be misunderstood.
Skits like this draw applause, but the play about a woman pushed in a closed and raped by a football prospect is met by silence. You can hear a stomach grumbling six rows down.
The evening’s message is summarized by the final skit, which includes a monologue during which an actor explains that all of these horrible things aren’t her fault and she can’t stop them anyway.
In response, all the other actors take turns quoting American author Edward Everett Hale: “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something.”
It communicates a piece of the school’s ethos: Not only do we help each other, but looking at suffering and ignoring it is intolerable.
As Multicultural Programs Director Virgil Jones says, “Once you know, you can’t act as if you don’t.”
Afterward, the audience splits into groups and ventures outdoors, forming circles of a dozen or so students in the darkness.
The discussions are led by a Gustie Greeter who met her group Saturday morning and has been leading them to events since.
She wields silence like a scalpel. Quiet can be used as a sort of conversational stimulant, provoking people to say things they don’t normally say.
A minute of silence goes by between stories. Sometimes two minutes. The greeter shares a few of her own troubles but says nothing else except for a few kind words after someone shares a story. A few cry softly as they talk.
A woman shares her worries about being away from home with a medical problem. Another talks about a brother going to prison and her family struggling to pay for his treatment afterward.
A student talks about a family schism caused by a missing uncle whom some presume dead but others want to still search for.
The play’s unabashed sentimentality is a bit campy, acknowledges actor Ethan Bjelland, a sophomore. But he says he has strong memories from bonding with his own group after the play last year.
More to it
Not all the community building is this intense.
There are Monday morning games, featuring group contests for screaming (pitch and volume, it seems), dancing, smelliest shoes and cheer-writing. There’s an ice cream social with the president and other get-to-know-each-other activities.
The Reading In Common program asks all the incoming freshmen to read the same book and then discuss it.
And when the new students drive up College Avenue, they’re greeted by students waving and welcoming them.
(Well, they usually are. Construction on Highway 169 thwarted that tradition this year.)
Fit in, then learn
Ruble, the student activities director, coordinates orientation.
There are 10 goals on paper for new student orientation and most of them are about relationships and adjusting to the routines of college life.
Ruble summarizes one of them as “get them familiar with the academic side of college.”
She immediately realizes the statement is a bit silly — it is primarily an institute of higher learning, after all — but it does demonstrate the focus of orientation.
That emphasis is borne out in post-orientation surveys.
In a 2005 survey answered by 59 percent of first-year students, 82 percent said the activities helped them in their social transition to college. Less than half, 35 percent, said it assisted their academic transition.
Even so, that didn’t seem to indicate that the new students were salivating for more learning in orientation.
Fifty-four percent thought there ought to have been more social activities, whereas 29 percent wanted more academic ones.
All the emphasis on socializing new students could leave orientation open to the charge that it short-changes the real business of college.
Ruble says social needs aren’t necessarily more important than academic ones; they’re just a pre-requisite. In order to learn, students need to be comfortable and find their place.
‘Just so friendly’
Four days of orientation can’t explain the culture of an entire school. Theres are four years to ago, and students already develop a good impression of the school beforehand, or else they wouldn’t have come.
But however they get the impression, the students here share it.
Amanda Skarphol, an actor with I Am We Are, says total strangers seem to care about her well-being here.
“That is why I picked Gustavus, everyone was just so friendly.”
