In recent years at UK universities such as the University of Edinburgh, the language of community and belonging has become increasingly visible. This is evident in institutional initiatives – task groups, staff and student guidance, and strategic plans – that foreground connection, inclusion, and student experience.
One explanation is straightforward: universities are responding to identifiable issues. Post-pandemic patterns of study, more time spent online, and an increasingly diverse and mobile student population can make people less visible to one another and render informal, everyday forms of association less reliable. What was once sustained through shared time and space now more often requires deliberate support. This applies to staff as well as students. Where routine, unplanned encounters once provided a steady sense of shared concerns and perspectives, interaction is now more often organised and episodic, with less of the background familiarity those encounters sustained. In psychology, research on nostalgia (for example, work by Constantine Sedikides) suggests that heightened attention to states such as connection or belonging is often associated with their perceived absence: people tend to dwell on or invoke what feels diminished, sometimes as a way of compensating for it.
What seems clear, at least, is a shift in emphasis. Community is no longer treated as something that can be taken for granted as a by-product of shared intellectual life, but as something to be actively designed, measured, and managed.
This is where Alasdair MacIntyre offers a useful way of framing the issue. In After Virtue, he distinguishes between practices and institutions, arguing that while practices are concerned with internal goods, the institutions that sustain them are necessarily oriented toward external goods – efficiency, reputation, measurable outcomes – which can come to dominate the practices themselves. Under those conditions, the shared activities that generate a sense of common purpose are harder to sustain in their own right. Read in this light, the current emphasis on belonging begins to look less like a straightforward solution and more like a response to that difficulty: an attempt to secure, through policy and design, what no longer arises as readily from participation in a shared practice.
References
Alasdair MacIntyre. 2004. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edn. London: Duckworth. (First published 1981).
Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge. 2015. ‘Nostalgia as a Psychological Resource’. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(10), pp. 808–818.
(Henri Matisse: La danse (I), 1909, Museum of Modern Art. )
