It has become commonplace to describe all sorts of phenomena in positive terms. Take the word community. It is often applied to any group of people with something vaguely in common, however thin or ill-defined that thing might be. To call such a group a community immediately suggests coherence, shared recognition, and solidarity.
Curiously, the word tends to attach itself to higher-status fields. One rarely hears of the plumbing community, yet we readily speak of the scientific community, the academic community, the student community, various discourse communities, and in my particular case, the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) community.
What gets obscured here is the depth of meaning the term ‘community’ can carry. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argued that the original sense of ‘politics’ – the shared public action once embodied in the Greek polis – has been lost in the modern world. Her image of pearl diving – used in Men in Dark Times to characterise Walter Benjamin’s approach, but applicable to her own practice of retrieving fragments of lost political insight – captures her effort to recover such meanings and test them against contemporary practice. So it is with community. What did it once mean? And, measured against that standard, might today’s so-called communities be made more genuinely community-like – and would we even want them to be?
Before asking whether today’s academic or EAP ‘communities’ measure up, we need to recover what the word can mean at its strongest. The word itself has both a thin and a thick sense. Communitas derives from communis, meaning common, implying fellowship or public spirit. In this thin sense, it is accurate enough to describe the scientific community as a community: its members share institutions, some practices, and some norms. But the term has long also signified something stronger: a body of people living together in commitment to shared practices and obligations. In this fuller sense, community is not just common interest but common life.
Few traditions took the stronger sense as seriously as Western monasticism, above all in the Rule of St Benedict (c. 530), which remains the foundational text for Benedictine and Cistercian life. Here, community meant not simply working in the same field or sharing a vocabulary, but binding oneself to others in a shared way of life. By contrast, many of today’s communities look thin indeed – more like professional networks or convenient labels than genuine bodies of shared life. Perhaps the truth is that the communities we invoke so readily, from the scientific community to the EAP community, often have little substance beyond coordination or shared interest, falling far short of the richer ideal of belonging and commitment the word community can signify.
Could we reinvoke this thicker sense of community and develop some of our own? Would it be possible – or even desirable – to have a genuine workplace community, for example? Or a university community? Or a classroom community?
At first glance, the idea of ‘monasticising’ the university seems almost absurd. Structurally, the two forms of life appear incompatible: the monastery is built on lifelong stability, a unified conception of the good, explicit hierarchy, and a shared spiritual telos; the modern research university, by contrast, runs on turnover, specialisation, disciplinary fragmentation, and the deliberate cultivation of disagreement.
Nevertheless, thinking about monastic life raises questions, such as:
- Why do the communities we name in universities feel thin, rhetorical, or non-existent?
- Which elements of thick community – stability of membership, shared daily practices, mutual obligation – are most conspicuously absent, and what do we lose by their absence?
- Are there pockets of the university – labs, studios, small postgraduate cohorts – where something closer to common life actually does emerge?
- What institutional structures undermine thicker forms of belonging?
The monastery model would suggest that community is demanding; that it is structured rather than spontaneous; that it depends on shared practices; and that it requires sustained relationships over time. The university meets almost none of these conditions at scale. But at smaller scales – seminars, research groups, teaching teams – it sometimes gets close.
If we keep using the word ‘community’ as a feel-good label for mere coordination or shared branding, we will go on wondering why our workplaces and universities feel increasingly atomised and instrumental. But if we are willing to retrieve the older, more demanding sense – if we start asking what shared practices, what forms of mutual obligation, and what sustained relationships we are prepared to build and protect – then ‘community’ might become, once again, a description of a common life worth living.
In the EAP world, as in the wider academy, that probably begins not with grand declarations but with small acts: teaching the same group for more than one semester, co-designing materials over months or even years rather than weeks, meeting face-to-face when Teams would be easier, and treating colleagues as members of a shared project whose goals are common, not merely individual.
Then perhaps we can call ourselves a community.
(Dirck Jacobsz: Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation)
