Just in time for Christmas Fest . . .

MPR sent a reporter to St. Olaf to scope out the larger context.  Here are his blog posts: LINK  This is also just in time for our consideration of St. Olaf in 201.  The reporter hits most of our current talking points: the community of trust, the food, the dorm life, the music, the Norwegian stuff in the bookstore, the chapel.  Not much about the education, I notice.  And we'd want to think about how the parts go together.  What institutional practices contribute to the community of trust?  Not every residential school has that.  Does singing together build that sort of capital and does that leak out to the non-singers through shared living space?  Isn't that account just a tiny bit too simple?  Certainly we are decades past a time when one could argue that the trust was the side-effect of thick lines of family relationships, but there might be some residual effect, but that assumes that people who are related to each other naturally trust each other.

So my point?  Just this, the description may be accurate as far as it goes, but the posts lack much in the way of analysis.  (To be fair, they also don't promise any analysis.)  That is what we need to do ourselves.  And as we do it we might pay attention to the social effects of so many students in musical ensembles and the spill over effect, especially since we're had other occasions this semester to think about resonances between a particular sort of music and some aspect of American life.