The Desire to Participate: Student Housing Co-ops Let Students Open Up

A generous number of college students these days are falling from their oversized suburban nests onto college campuses and finding out that their dorms are extensions of what they just left- typically exclusionary and solitary. It’s easy to get trapped in front of your computer or video game, Facebooking or MySpacing-out for hours and not even notice you’re alone in your dorm room.

But trends are afoot—the new college housing movement is looking oddly like that which inspired the 60s communes. Maybe college kids have heard of “that” era, but few would recognize it. According to a new story in the NYT, students are not only giving campus co-op living a chance for financial reasons, but it’s becoming the latest and hippest living arrangement:

The current interest in co-ops stems in part from the economic imperative that rising housing costs have wrought. But more than anything else, students suggest, it has grown up in reaction to the alienating aspects of modern campus life.

Co-ops on most campuses are budget digs for college kids who either can’t afford off-campus apartments and the accoutrements that come attached to that responsibility, or don’t have the stomach for the isolation of big dorms, some of the same that they had at home.

Ala Real World? Does the newest installment of the co-op movement have roots in reality TV? While we watch, isolated in front of our televisions, real world individuals are forced to live in close quarters and survive in the company of each other; we watch them negotiate, argue, rant and rave and eventually find some common ground. We watch. I think we are finally longing to be participants. We’ve disengaged long enough from lengthy and uninterrupted periods of human interaction that now there is a new desire to be present in that which we have removed ourselves.

Maybe the move to the co-ops, for some students, began as financial. Certainly the very first student housing co-ops were created in the 1930s in answer to the hordes of students whose families were wracked financially by the Great Depression. For some today, financial is just an excuse to participate in the company of others or the traditional hippie alternative that’s been functioning all along especially in places like California. When we enter our phase of digital isolation we did it so frenetically, so celebratory, but celebration is about group and Facebook and MySpace don’t get it.

More and more college students are shunning the dorms in favor of co-ops and other alternative living quarters; spaces where they have to cook together and share milk and wash dishes and wear deodorant and arrive at democratic understandings or else pay the price for their inability to function in the company of others.

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