Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young?
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.