From the Bridge: On Runabouts and Returns: Connecting Campus and Local Community through PWR

I opened my comments at September Sessions last year noting that I might back away from some of my continual references to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I hope you’ll allow me some latitude since last Spring, quite to my surprise, led me to a chance to build a course on the topic. With that in mind, the various trips DS9 characters took away from the space station in small runabout ships, and the trips that Captain Sisko took home to New Orleans provide a bit of inspiration for this installment of From the Bridge. What happens when we get to step away in short treks to return to the station and what seems like the magic of Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and Sisko’s need to stay connected to community and homes new and old—in New Orleans, on Bajor, and on the station stayed on my mind last year and remain as we start a new one together?

Some of you know that last year was the busiest year of the nine years I’ve had with you so far, and that even as I didn’t know where I was some of the time, it was also one of the most rewarding years I’ve had in my career. Those of you who have been with us for a while remember that when I interviewed and when I first arrived, I talked about creating space for us to connect and engage with local communities that matter to us as part of our work. As much as I yearned to get back to that work myself, my initial efforts were halting, and even sporadic, as I found my way into the role.

This past year was one where I was finally able to return to that work in ways that (I think) I can sustain, and that I know will help to sustain me, and I’d like to share a bit about that experience here, for a few reasons: there’s a little bit of what I learned and found in community in East Palo Alto and Cleveland, but I also believe that there are significant ways we can collectively find purpose and impact looking beyond the campus—reaching beyond the campus ourselves, and bringing people to campus with us—that can strengthen what we do for our students and for each other.

The year involved three main efforts with two community partners. I worked with StreetCode Academy in East Palo Alto and with UnBar Café in Cleveland. A little context before some of the details: I’ve always believed that the education we work to provide, guide, encourage for our students must reach beyond the resources of the campus. I often encourage them to see the communities from which they come and the people who have poured into them and those practices and traditions as being crucial to the higher education they forge and fashion for themselves while they are here. I often put it something like this: “if the full extent of your Stanford education takes place in these buildings and on the “8180” acres of the campus, then you’ve done yourself a disservice.” I also believe that developing rich, two-way, reciprocal connections and relationships with surrounding local communities in co-inquiry, co-creation and co-curation is crucial for a college or university to thrive. To put it differently, getting students beyond the bubble is only part of our responsibility.

With those and a few other principles in mind, I began by offering free versions of my campus classes in local community spaces. In terms of logistics, my aim is to always have refreshments, books, and any other materials we might use available to participants free of charge. In terms of broader goals, the logic behind offering versions of the campus courses in local spaces has a few elements to it: part of it isn’t about “courses” and their content, writing, and learning goals at all, but rather using the idea of a free community course as just that—an opportunity to build and nurture community. At the same time, it is about the courses and opening up greater access to what we do, and to inquiry more broadly: intellectual work shouldn’t only or mostly be locked behind tuition paywalls. Connecting both of these premises is a desire to contribute to more robust third spaces. Grounding all of these aims for me is a desire to facilitate collective thinking, imagining, play, planning, advocacy or whatever might emerge in ways that everyone who might choose to participate is affirmed and valued for what they have to contribute. During Winter quarter I facilitated the Rhetoric and Black Digital Cultures course at EPACenter in East Palo Alto and at UnBar Café. For Spring quarter, I offered a local version of the Deep Space Nine course at UnBar. Finally, this summer I offered a community based reading group for Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, also at UnBar in Cleveland.

Each of the three efforts this year had significant successes, and offered reflections for ways to iterate and improve for future versions. Each of the courses and the reading group were received enthusiastically, and for the Cleveland group, a growing sense of connection added to the excitement for each session. Numbers of participants for the courses ranged from 15 at EPACenter to 35+ each week for the various efforts in Cleveland; part of this difference is explained by the fact that I haven’t yet established the kinds of relationships I want to throughout East Palo Alto, where by contrast in Cleveland the homecoming element drew some participants even if we didn’t know each other previously.

I hope to talk more about my own experience with this kind of attempt to foster community away from campus, in both its challenges (TIME, whew!) and possibilities at some point. One of the greatest personal benefits for me has been the reminder that I’m at my best when I help to create spaces for us to figure things out together. In community spaces off campus, I don’t have to be Dr. B. with the answers—I get to just be and help to curate a conversation that might lead us all to some attempts at answers and more questions. As you might imagine, that’s liberating for me in our work on campus, too.

For now, however, the main reflection I want to share with PWR is the way my time in East Palo Alto and Cleveland last year affirmed the initial hope I had for us to be intentional in reaching beyond campus, both individually and collectively. We’ve taken some steps in that direction already: many of you have your own ways you show up in local spaces you’re invested in. You teach off campus, you volunteer, you engage in wide-ranging literacy work, some of which you share with us in annual review narratives and other ways. Marvin, Christine and I have long noted that community- or publicly-engaged work can count toward the intellectual contributions part of how you dedicate your time. I hope to find funds to offer micro grants to pay for supplies or meals or transportation for those of you who want to take some of your ideas and commitments beyond campus. I’d also love to see us be able to offer Hume Center pop ups in places that you, our undergraduate and graduate tutors and Zandra decide, should we have capacity to do so. Finally, for ways we can reach beyond the campus, I think we can be a hub for recognizing creative community building efforts (especially in the Bay Area) that connect wide-ranging literacy and language work to PWR’s mission and vision. The work we do together, and the brilliance with which you do it can offer so much—especially given the approach to that work we have forged in PWR and the ways you create community in the program for each other.