These days, everyone is wondering about how to create more of a feeling of community on campus.  This isn’t just about getting students comfortable within a campus community, which is key to improving completion rates and raising student satisfaction. In many places it’s also about finding ways to get through what a seemingly worsening set of relations between faculty members and administration, Boards and senates, etc.  So how to get more, shall we say, esprit de corps? 

I say, read Aristotle.

Sure, Aristotle got a lot of stuff deeply wrong.  He believed in a geocentric universe.  He thought the brain functioned as a temperature-regulator.  He was convinced eels couldn’t procreate because he couldn’t see their gonads.  But when it came to social sciences, he had some serious insight.  One of the most interesting ones was his observation in Politics about the sources of social cohesion and in particular how communal meals in places such as Sparta and Crete made these polities much stronger than those where meals were taken in private.

And there is a lesson there.  We need to pay more attention to food culture on campus.  Doing so could pay large dividends with students, faculty and the community.

If you want students to do anything, really, one of the most effective ways to do so is to lay out some food (in my day it was pizza, but I am pretty sure students are healthier these days).  It’s not just that money is tight for students and free food is a way of easing some of their cash worries, it’s that being able to eat with others creates interactions outside of classroom, which is basically one thing most students say they want from their time on campus.  Take away such interactions and they will leave for other destinations (such as jobs, which tend to pay decently these days).  Add such interactions and they will stay.

I don’t think many institutions are able to give away free food all the time, though it wouldn’t be difficult to add one or two events a year like that.  But why not strategically lower prices at cafeterias and food courts across campus?   The urge to use this set of ancillary services as a profit centre is historically a product of the last three decades: why not go back to an earlier version of campus services and have cheaper options for students and see what happens to student satisfaction and engagement?  You don’t have to go whole hog.  At larger universities, you could experiment with one or two of the smaller eateries in campus and see what happens.  Where you only have a single food court, do a time-limited experiment (e.g. six months) where you get the retail provider(s) to reduce prices for a few months and measure the effects.  If it works, great.  If it doesn’t, you’ve done your part to advance evidence-based decision-making at your institution.

Food can help with community-building, too.  Institutions may have got out of the habit of holding open days in the last few years, but inviting the community onto campus for events is important for building support and allyship in the community.  And to make such invitations welcoming: why not make food a centrepiece of events on campus?  Invite in chefs and restauranters from the community to do the food and make it clear that your institution is about helping others in the community (in this case by showcasing their cuisine), not simply helping itself.  And yes, I know, this kind of thing would, in many cases, violate campus agreements with vendors.  Shouldn’t matter.  Pay them to look the other way.  And don’t negotiate those kinds of exclusivity agreements next time.

But there’s a final case for Food as a Strategy, and concerns bringing together what for a lack of a better term I will call the “permanent” campus community.  I don’t have hard evidence for this proposition, but one thing I have noticed in my travels is that those institutions which have retained some kind of faculty club or university club (many closed in the 1990s and 2000s, victims mainly of the first work-from-home wave was caused by portable personal commuting) on the whole seem to have a calmer political atmosphere.  And I think there’s a pretty obvious reason for this: these kinds of spaces allow for low-stakes discussions about the way the university works.  Places where ideas can be explored and turned over in a conversational way.  More obviously, they are places where people with different job descriptions can meet and relax in something like convivial circumstances.  It’s likely harder for both admin and faculty to get all “us and them” if they regularly share meals. Conversely, if you reduce the number of low-stakes fora for discussing university policy, the only option will be to focus them in more high-stakes fora, like Senates or General Faculty Councils.  And what that leads to is a lot of unhelpful grandstanding that gets in the way of serious decision-making.

I have spoken before about the need for institutions to learn how to make decisions faster to achieve what I call “rapid collegiality.”   I suspect one of the fastest ways to get there is for people to have more meals together.  Institutions should use food to relentlessly multiply the number of low-stakes conversations about governance and policy.  Schedule events just for drinking, eating, and chatting.  Make damn sure admin appear at as many of these as possible just to reach out and discuss issues.  And if you still have a faculty club, don’t lose it.  Do whatever it takes.

So, at the risk of torturing another metaphor: think of our campuses as places as vehicles which badly need an oil change.  And think of food as a social lubricant (which it is).  Isn’t it worth a little investment to make things run more smoothly?