You spend a lot of time talking about "community" as it relates to college life. Why was this such an important topic for you?

In the book, I look at things that the university says it wants to focus on. They say, "We're a community of scholars, we're a community of diversity, we're about intellectual life." That's what the university thinks it is. From what I saw, the student's version of these concepts is very different.

What does "community" mean to the students you talked to?

I saw a much more individualized version of community. For most people who said, "I've got community here," it was the five people they hang out with. And that really becomes their university.

You can see that in the kinds of housing that students are attracted to. The old dorms are built according to the "big community" idea, with huge lobbies furnished with big overstuffed chairs, three TVs in giant rooms. But nobody is using them! People are going to an off-campus apartment to visit friends, or they're all congregating in one person's room. At my university we have one dorm with a waiting list, and of course this dorm has big suites, four rooms with a living room, washer and dryer, bathroom. It's like an apartment with everything there. Students only ever have to interact with three or four other people.

I talk about the time my dorm had a big Super Bowl party and only a handful of people attended. Everybody else was sitting alone or with one or two other friends in their own rooms, watching the game.

You suggest that our "overoptioned" public university system is not conducive to building community. Can you elaborate on that?

You have so many choices in a university that people become a community of one. You have a hundred majors to choose from. So let's say you have 10,000 people. Then you've got 1,000 people in each major, and you break them down even further by saying, do you want to live on campus or off-campus? Do you want a meal plan in the dining halls or do you want to eat off-campus? Do you want to join a club? The students have so many choices that by the time everyone is done choosing, nobody is living the same life. It's 6 p.m. in the dorm, and you're done with classes, so you say, "Do you want to get dinner?" And everyone's like, "I can't because I've got this, I've got that." That makes it much harder to connect.

That's one of the justifications for fraternities and sororities: They make the university smaller and give people a sense of community.

Fraternities and sororities are a big way that people can hang out. But in terms of diversity, you end up with people just like you. But it's not only the Greek system [that works against diversity]. Many of the things universities do to construct an early freshman experience limit diversity. For example, summer river trips, getting all the kids who are the first in their families to go to college together, holding special socials for the Hispanic kids ... If you do that right away, those are the kids that will stick together.

But at least then they'll be able to spot familiar faces within the larger, more intimidating, faceless university population.

The university is pitting this [abundance of options] against community, and they need to find the right balance. Maybe there's some timing involved. Maybe in first semester, there is less choice, then you can open it to more choice later.

You wanted to find a "model" of a class that students were really excited about. That class happened to be Sexuality.

Students seemed to be excited about the fact that there was a connection between the things they were doing outside of class and the things they were studying inside of class. One of the questions I asked in the formal interviews was, "What are you in college for?" People would say, "To learn. I'm not just here to party." But they told me that 65 percent of what they were learning came from outside of class, and only 35 percent came from in class. I was a little surprised by the percentages. But since I am trying to be a better professor, I have to take a lesson from classes like Sexuality and try to connect the information that students are learning in class to their lives outside of class.

Since you've gone back to teaching, have you been able to do that?

Yes. I'm now teaching a freshman class called The Anthropology of Everyday Life. Before I did the research for this book, I wasn't teaching freshmen at all, only graduate students. But after this experience, I decided I wanted to go back to undergraduate teaching. In this class, I'm trying to connect anthropological concepts to things that are going on in their lives. For example, let's say I'm teaching about cultural expression or art in another culture, and I'm showing all the different ways that these expressions reflect cultural values. I take freshman into the dorms, and I say, "Let's look at how students decorate their doors. Look at the phrases, the images. What are we saying about ourselves?"

The students at AnyU develop strategies for getting the best grades possible, often at the expense of learning, absorbing new material, or challenging themselves. Many students talk about "working the teacher," some admitting that they tell the teacher what he or she wants to hear, even when it's contrary to their own opinions.

It's not surprising to me that students work professors and are into grades. The surprising thing about that conversation was that the student who said that she "worked the professor" also said that she had learned more from that course than anything else. Before my study, I was always on the lookout for this [kind of behavior]. Now I'm not as concerned if I feel like somebody is "working me" to get a good grade. It isn't personal. Before, I was annoyed if people ate or slept in class. Now I'm concerned. I know people are living very busy lives, they have a packed schedule, and sometimes they don't even have time for a meal or a break.

No doubt there are some students that are going to try to pick all easy A's, and for those students I probably feel the same way as I used to: Come on, what are you here for? But for most students I no longer think that is what is going on. I realize what they're up against, and I realize how hard it is to get everything to work in the schedule. With the student whose only reason for wanting to join my class is because "it's the only thing that fits in the schedule," instead of being annoyed, I now think, at least I have the opportunity to teach them something about anthropology and maybe spark an interest in them for the rest of their lives.

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