The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2 - 60

Jane Fried

the capacity of citizens to be accountable and to become creators of community” (p.64). Block’s notion of citizenship, what we now call civic engagement, is a current reframing of Crookston’s ideas of structure and process in an IDC. Students who lived in the University of Connecticut IDC now refer to their experience as one which taught them how to get involved in community organizations as leaders and followers, how to understand and diagnose group problems so that they could intervene, and how to stop bullying and to use the community as a safe place to raise important questions: Because I was in IDC . . . I usually say “we” instead of “you” or “them,” as in “Do we have any more toilet paper?” (B. Moeller) Because I was at IDC I learned to respect all people and the importance of community. (B. Rossard) Because I was in IDC, I believe in democracy, because I have personally seen it work—much more satisfying if your view doesn’t hold when you hear real people you respect espousing views you don’t agree with. (D. Sanford) Because I was at IDC, I try to teach my students the concept of interdependence, and I set up my classrooms with a variety of group configurations. (T. Matranga-Howlett) Because I believed IDC was not static, but rather dynamic, I believe that I am empowered to create a new reality. To that end, I was a founding mother of Family School in 1987, the last alternative elementary program adopted by the local school district. (Jen-Lin Hodgden)
(IDC site on Facebook, “Because I was in the IDC” thread. Downloaded January 31, 2009)

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF AN INTENTIONAL DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY
Crookston identified 10 essential elements of these communities: social contract, primary groups, shared goals and values, boundaries, power, work, commitment, transcendence, communion, and ongoing process. (These terms are defined in the Crookston article that accompanies this commentary.) His basic notion of the glue that made the community function was symbiosis. Symbiosis involved two aspects: “1) The creation of conditions that foster the actualization of the individual and 2) The creation of conditions that foster the actualization of the community” (1974, p. 58). The use of symbiosis as an organizing construct required that individuals give up some of their personal power, or autonomy, to the group in exchange for the support and inclusion that the community provided. The emphasis on shared power was drawn from the social contract theory of John Locke, who emphasized creating relationships based on the morality of the common good (Locke, 1924). Crookston integrated power, creating the social contract, work, and shared goals and values as the methodologies for creating community. He assumed that these issues would be addressed through extended conversation among community members as they created a sense of shared meaning for all these terms and processes. Democracy and its details became a process, an ongoing conversation, rather than a structure. As the community created its social contract, boundaries naturally emerged based on shared language and experiences. Community members engaged in creative, idiosyncratic

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2

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