Monday, June 26, 2006
USI's Center for Communal Studies celebrates 30 years
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USI’s Center for Communal Studies is celebrating its 30th anniversary in July. Dr. Donald Pitzer, director of the Center, smiles at the memory of how it all began – in a living room in Bishop Hill, Illinois, during Pitzer’s sabbatical tour of communities back in 1974. Pitzer joined the USI faculty in 1967, after receiving a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, where his concentration was 19th century social and intellectual history. He was interested in New Harmony, the site of Harmonist and Owenite communal experiments, before he came to USI, and when he arrived, Dr. David Rice (then dean of the campus) took him to New Harmony.  Future President Rice encouraged an affiliation between the University and New Harmony. He told Pitzer, “Most universities are known for something. I’d like the University to have a close association with New Harmony and be known for promoting restoration, interpretation, and study.” That association eventually resulted in Historic New Harmony, a unified program of USI and the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites. Pitzer’s communal journey When it came time for his first sabbatical, Pitzer’s aim was to visit each of the communal sites listed in Arthur Bestor Jr.’s Backwoods Utopias, published in 1950, the first major scholarly work on communal societies in America. Pitzer wrote to each site in the book. In some cases, the only address he had was the local post office. Many responded, including sites at Nauvoo and Bishop Hill, Illinois; Amana, Iowa; Bethel, Missouri; and Economy and Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In all, he visited about a dozen communities, including New Harmony’s origin sites at New Lanark, Scotland, and Iptingen, Germany. (In later years, Pitzer assisted in pairing Iptingen and New Harmony as sister cities.) “These were my first contacts at the ground level,” he said. At Bishop Hill Colony, founded by Swedish religious dissenters in the 19th century, Pitzer sat in the living room of site director Ron Nelson, a descendent of its founders, and dreamed up an association that would connect historic communities. “We thought that these communities should know about each other,” Pitzer said. In fall of 1974, the first meeting of what was to become the National Historic Communal Societies Association (renamed the Communal Studies Association in 1980) met in New Harmony. At a conference in Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, the following year, the NHCSA chose Pitzer as its first president, and asked USI to set up an agency, the Center for Communal Studies, to headquarter the organization and serve as a repository for documents and artifacts. USI was the appropriate location, one member said, because of its proximity to New Harmony, “the epicenter of communalism in America.” In a letter dated July 26, 1976, Dr. Robert L. Reid, then vice president for Academic Affairs, wrote to Pitzer: “Your proposal to establish a Center for Communal Studies at [USI] has been approved by the Administrative Council and President Rice.” The letter formally informed Pitzer that he had been designated as director of the Center, and was authorized to proceed with the selection of a University-wide executive committee and a nationwide board of advisors. “We hope that the Center eventually will be able to hold seminars and institutes and conduct tours to historic and living communes in the United States and abroad,” Reid wrote. Thirty years later Over the past 30 years, the Center has served as a worldwide hub for information and a unique resource for USI students and faculty as well as scholars, communitarians, and site directors around the globe. The repository the CSA requested has become a world-class archival collection. Among others, it includes the collections of Bestor, Pitzer’s mentor, who received an honorary doctorate from USI in 1988, and Karl Arndt, the first major Harmonist scholar. Its most recent acquisition, valuable manuscripts from The Separatist Society of Zoar, Ohio, were donated by John Lawrence ’73 in April 2006. The Center served as administrative base for the CSA until 1996, when Pitzer resigned as executive director, a position he held since 1977. He also served as first president of the International Communal Studies Association from 1988 to 1991. The Center headquartered the Fellowship for Intentional Community from 1990 to 1993 and helped publish its first Communities Directory. The Center assists the University in its interpretive, restorative, and administrative projects in New Harmony. The Center also has projected the nation’s first master’s program in communal studies, along with a broad-based Institute for the Study of Community. The Center for Communal Studies Lecture Series brings noted scholars and communitarians to the University. Susan Keig, a Chicago-based photographer and graphic designer who has designed projects for the Center and for Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, will be the featured lecturer in fall 2006. She is designing an exhibit of photographs from Shakertown that will be on display in the Liberal Arts Center. The Center for Communal Studies Prize, including a certificate and $500, is awarded each year to a USI undergraduate or graduate student with the best scholarly paper or thesis on a communal theme. Contemporary community Shortly after the CSA was formed, the youth movement of the 1960s and 70s erupted in communal activity, as young people left the cities to form their own utopias. Between 1968 and 1980 there was a “sunburst” of communal activity, Pitzer said. “Nobody knows how many communities formed, but it was from 10,000 to 20,000 at the low end and 100,000 at the high end. Current communities were barely visible in 1960. It was an exciting time.” The new youth movement communities invented alternatives to total income-sharing, such as land trusts, cooperatives, collectives, and cohousing arrangements. “We were looking at a continuation of an old phenomenon in a much more complex expression, including the hippie lifestyle, Jesus People, and increasingly, urban communities,” Pitzer said. “Thousands of groups founded in urban areas, whereas historic communities were agricultural.” The latest movement in intentional community is ecovillages, which emphasize environmental sustainability. In April, Pitzer attended the Campus-Community Partnerships for Sustainability conference at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The conference included a tour of the university’s ecovillage and workshops on solar energy, energy conservation, biodiesel, green building, and other sustainability topics. Pitzer said ecovillages are the wave of the future. “The Center is interested in ecovillages as voluntary, experimental laboratories that may provide practical solutions for environmental challenges,” he said. Why study community The Center’s interest in ecovillages alludes to the necessity of studying communal societies: They are voluntary social laboratories; microcosms of society. Communities can teach us how to live sustainably on the planet and how to get along with each other. “We’ve split the atom. We’ve stood on the moon. We can clone virtually any life form. But we can’t get along with each other,” Pitzer said. “And if we don’t solve that riddle, then nothing else is really going to matter in the long run. These communal groups give us some clues as to how that can be done. That’s really why I’ve stayed with it.” Communities also are instructive when they go wrong. “When people get so committed to a leader or a movement that they give up their judgment of what is moral, then you get a Jonestown - or a Nazi Germany. “If we neglect looking at these communal experiments, we’ve missed one of the great opportunities to solve the problems of diversity and survival.” The founder The study of communal societies has taken Pitzer to approximately 100 communities all over the world. He’s visited a dozen Israeli kibbutzim; historic sites such as Nauvoo, Amana, Oneida, Estero and Aurora; and contemporary ones such as Twin Oaks, Kashi Ashram, Sand Hill Farm, Arcosante, House of David, and Hutterite Bruderhofs. He visited a Chinese People’s Commune, the New Village of Japan, and spoke to the Robert Owen Association of Japan in 1984. He teaches a Capstone course in Utopia in addition to Seminar in Communal Societies, Communal Utopias in America, and Readings in Communal Utopias. His ground-breaking theory of developmental communalism made the field more objective by changing the definition of a community’s success. Before his theory was presented in 1983, a community’s perceived success was based on its longevity rather than viewing some communal arrangements as a phase within a social movement. “It’s helped us to understand that movements use the communal method of organizing during an early stage and may find over time that other ways of organizing and disseminating their vision are more effective,” Pitzer said. He has contributed chapters and articles to many scholarly and community-related publications and edited America’s Communal Utopias, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1997. In 1994, Pitzer was awarded the first Distinguished Service Award given by the Communal Studies Association. The award was subsequently named in his honor as the CSA’s founder. The Center for Communal Studies received the Donald E. Pitzer Distinguished Service Award in 2001. “One of the greatest joys for me is how many younger people have gotten involved and will sometimes sign a book, ‘Thanks for your help,’” Pitzer said. “At conferences, watching people talk with each other, I remember Ron Nelson in his house in Bishop Hill, and dreaming about getting these people together.” He smiles at the memory. The Center for Communal Studies is located in the Liberal Arts Center Room 2009. Its Board of Directors includes Dr. David Glassman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts; Michael Aakhus, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts; John Lawrence ‘73, an international expert on ancient manuscripts who recently donated manuscripts from The Separatist Society of Zoar to the Center for Communal Studies; Matthew Graham, director of Creative Writing; Tim VanMeter, assistant professor of Christian education and youth ministry at Methodist Theological School in Ohio; Dr. Martha Raske, director of the Master of Social Work program; Dr. Charles Petranek, professor of sociology; Dr. Jane Johansen, associate professor of business education; Dr. Tamara Hunt, chair of the History Department; Gina Walker, University archivist; Ruth Miller (ex-officio), director of Rice Library; Dr. Susan Matarese of the University of Louisville; Rachel Summerton of Padanaram Settlement; and Dr. Greg Brown ‘90 of the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation. For more information, call the Center at 812/464-1727. Contemporary intentional community photos are used with permission of the Twin Oaks Archives. |
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