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Issues of Student Life are, in fact, the ones that seem to have been the one uniting force within the community. Three Johnston students describe the situation: ``From 1979 to 1994 Johnston has based much of its identity on its struggle to keep the autonomy it has held and to regain what it has lost... In the last decade we have failed to dramatically evolve, basing out identity on the struggle for autonomy rather than our experimenting spirit.'' In fact, they hold this responsible for the lack of recent innovation: ``What should have been a temporary phase of development has stagnated into a permanent state, and in the mean time, on a National level, traditional education has nearly caught up.'' [7]
From McCoy's initial vision, Johnston Community always held the ultimate goal of a living-learning community. A community where students and faculty decide together how they will learn, how they will be evaluated, and how they will live. A Community where everyone would be a learner. The days of the Community deciding on issues as financially significant as faculty appointments left when the University took back Johnston's right to have its own faculty. Yet the Community still meets at least biweekly to discuss issues of living. Significant academic decisions are no longer made by the Community. The graduation requirements are set up and have been relatively static for years now. Faculty are no longer hired or fired by Johnston itself. While I visited, the Community was deciding how it wanted to
One of the roles of the Community Meeting is to allocate the $20,000 ASUR [SEE FOOTNOTE] gives to the Johnston Community to spend. Some of it currently goes towards funding XCC, Johnston's student-run computer center; much of it, however, is put towards activity programming within the Johnston community.
Yet, within and outside off the Community, the question of what a living-learning community is, and whether Johnston was or is pursuing one, has remained in people's minds:
It is interesting to note that for many Johnstonians as well as the immediate neighbors at the University of Redlands, Johnston education was identified with individualized learning. [emphasis in original] This identification contrasts sharply with the enormous energies that were expended throughout the College's history toward a creation of community as the basis of education. The dichotomy of individual versus community was never satisfactorily resolved in Johnston experience. Many students and some faculty suffered from the vicious cycle of a tendency toward social regression and atomization: ``doing-my-own-thing'' leading to the ``I-can't-get-my-head-together'' syndrome, which invited the ``that's-your-problem-and-not-mine'' response, which, in turn, resulted in loneliness and alienation, from which one would attempt to escape by doing one's own thing. It was all too easy to accuse them of being misfits and potential dropouts. Even when we were awakened by the consistent and persistent high rate of attrition threatening the College's financial status, we failed to address ourselves to the larger social forces that operated behind their egoisms and frustrations. We tended to take at face value or to psychologize their individual situations and explain away their inability to remain members of the community.[21]
Probably the biggest point of anger towards the University is still the ever-present Student Life office. The situation becomes ever-more pronounced as Johnston is ever-more integrated into the University. While the University pays lip-service to the idea of a living-learning community, certainly advertising it as an essential feature of Johnston, it at the same time cannot avoid noticing that the contradiction seems so present in Johnston students' minds that almost half of them have given up and moved off Complex, most off campus, due to frustration with Student Life. Of course the University has a very different idea of what a living-learning community is. It does not, for example, buy into the idea that within a living-learning community the professors are engaging in the process of learning with their students.
``What would Johnston be like without the oversight of the University?'' I would ask. ``A lot better...what I've been saying is that we just have got to get off campus. The whole Johnston Center has to get off campus.'' When I ask Johnstonians why the Center doesn't try to separate itself more from the University again, teachers and students alike respond that financially it is an impossibility. Johnston doesn't have a sufficient student body to give it that option, and the number of faculty is too small to give it the diversity of disciplines Johnston students require.
The past years have been marked by a continuation of the same conflicts that have confronted the community from day one. In the 88-89 school year, back in the days when two Resident Directors were hired (one for each of the Complex's dorms) rather than one Complex Director, Student Life ignored the Community's consensus for both Direcor's appointments. The following year the Community did not decide on the new Resident Directors, and Student Life decided over the summer.[9]
Three years ago too many Johnstonians were living off campus, and the University threatened to take away one of the Johnston dorms in return. Johnston students proposed a contract with Student Life that, as long as they were allowed to live on Complex without being on the meal plan, they would move back into the dorms. Student Life agreed, and many students moved back. However, when The Hunsacker Center, including a new dining commons, was constructed in 1994, Student Life reneged on their committment, and forced all students back onto the meal plan.
In the spring of 1994, the Community was presented with two candidates for the position of Complex Director. Complex director is a position, usually held by a recent Johnston alumn, that is the connection between University Student Life and the campus. One of the candidates was approved by Consensus by the Community. The University Office of Student Life chose the other candidate, however. Additionally, many women are disapponted by the lack of women Complex Directors, considering the 4:1 ratio of women to men at Johnston. Yet apparently, the search for a candidate, run by Student Life, simply did not identify any women candidates.
At the end of each semester, Resident Assistants are chosen for the following semester. These are paid positions, one per floor of just over 20 people. They share duty times and are general all-around coordinators of events and are available as emotional and academic support. Typically, a committee chooses the Resident Assistants with community input at specified sessions. The community either approves (by consensus) or makes the committee reconsider. This past spring, the community blocked consensus. The committee gave back the same result, however. The Community seemed to be ready to block consensus again; however, Johnston Director Yasuyuki Owada announced that Johnston had once again demonstrated its self-governance ineptitude and submitted the committee's results himself.
Not surprisingly, with the issues of the new dining commons policy and the R-staff hirings (R-staff includes the Complex Director as well as the Resident Assistants), students have begun moving off campus again.
The community divisions introduced in the choice of Resident Assistants and Complex Director carried over to the fall semester. Student Life demanded that the new Complex Director put an end to the Johnston tradition of allowing returning students to dribble back onto campus during new student orientation. He sent out a letter to the Community explaining the position, attempting to logically explain the situation. Instead of the Community uniting against the University however, this action brought a distrust of the Complex Director. If the Community had chosen the Complex Director themselves, the uproar would certainly have been against Student Life rather than the Complex Director, but because the new Complex Director was not the community choice, members of the community focused their frustration on him.
The latter half of the semester brought with it some serious divisions within the Community. Hall disagreements over noise levels (especially partying after midnight) built up tension. Some community members seemed to be more respected in their requests for quiet. The offending members were indignant at the ferocity with which quiet was demanded...hall meetings were held...Community Meetings were held; yet the confict continued to escalate. Nearing the end of the semester, a furious student contacted the University office of Student Life, so indignant at the Community's inability to solve the noise problem. ``Sexual harassment'' was brought up as the explanation for the issue, and miscommunication disabled the Community. Freshman women, Upperclass women, men, and Student Life all seemed to have different definitions of ``sexual harassment,'' but there was a failure for anyone to acknowledge that difference. Eventually, Student Life kicked some of the accused members off Complex for the Spring, with the agreement that there would be fair hearings. There was an appeal because the hearings would not be fair to the ones who were doing the accusing, and that is where the community now stands.
A house divided cannot stand, said Lincoln. Yet Johnston seems to be hobbling, slowly recovering, coming back to life as a working Community.
``We feel that the recent cries for a `Johnston Renaissance' are more sentimental than directed. We predict that Johnston can better assure its future if it revisions itself rather than nostalgically attempting to return to its original model.''[7] [emphasis in original]