Author’s note: An expanded version of these reflections can be found in the author’s Field Notes blog.

One often hears sabbaticals characterized as times to “recharge,” but as someone who has just concluded a year-long sabbatical, that’s not the term I would use to describe my experience. “Reevaluation” is better, I think. The main catalyst for my reevaluation was a residency at MacDowell, the venerable retreat founded by American composer and pianist Edward MacDowell nestled in the New England woods. My time at MacDowell was transformative, changing me in profound and lasting ways. I felt whole in a way that’s elusive during the usual rush of “normal” life; this in turn caused me to ponder how my MacDowell experience might inform how we teach in the conservatory.

In many ways, life at MacDowell is the opposite of life in an academic institution: empowering, nourishing, freeing. To accept that these are not things we usually associate with higher education may be difficult at first: we want to believe our institutions are the magical places we wish they were, the magical places they could be but so often aren’t. Acknowledgment of this harsh reality can inspire us to ask some useful questions: How can our institutions create an environment that is empowering, nourishing, and freeing– and not just for our students, but also for those of us entrusted to teach them? Does it have to feel so hopeless?

I’ve identified two critical pieces to what makes MacDowell such an extraordinary place, and they also happen to be two things that are largely missing from the conservatory: focus and community. It might surprise you to see “focus” here, since the very notion of a conservatory is a place for special and intensive attention to mastering one’s craft. But I would argue that the structure of the conservatory curriculum actively works against focus (especially for undergraduates). Music students are among the most overloaded students on campus, with courses in theory and history, private lessons, chamber music, and ensembles…not to mention countless hours of practice and homework from their university’s general education requirements. Many are working significant hours to pay for their tuition as well! If we define “focus” as the ability to direct as much attention to an endeavor as it requires without distractions, then today’s music student has virtually no room for focus. Moreover, true focus requires time to reflect, to get out of the weeds and zoom out for the big picture, and to let our minds wander and explore unconsidered thoughts, radical ideas, or divergent paths. It shouldn’t surprise us that our institutions provide so few of these things to our students: we have so little of them ourselves! How can we model what I’ll call “healthy focus” if the only time we can practice it is when we’re fortunate enough to have a sabbatical?

Now for community. For such an overused term, it’s nevertheless hard to define. Typically, we would say a community is a group of individuals who share certain affinities or beliefs. However, MacDowell helped me see that shared affinities may not be everything we claim they are. For instance, Fellows included playwrights, visual artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, and, of course, composers. Most of us didn’t necessarily know much (if anything) about each other’s artistic practice; even if we did, there was still a wide range of styles and aesthetic sensibilities to consider. While there’s certainly benefit to a mutual understanding of the creative life, with all its challenges and blessings, assuming this will automatically translate into community is misguided. Community requires more. Community can only exist in a space where empathy, mutual respect, vulnerability, and open-mindedness are embraced, nurtured, and celebrated. These things don’t emerge by accident; they are rooted in shared rituals and experiences, and a celebration of each member of the community and their contribution to the whole.

So, how can we develop focus and community in our institutions? There aren’t tidy answers to these questions, but here are a few things to ponder. Consider the “Block Plan” utilized by Colorado College, in which students– and faculty– engage in one course at a time, a deep intensive into a particular area of study. Focus is built into the very structure of the experience. That may not be practical in a music school, but there are ways we could bring more focus to our existing courses. For instance, what if the piece being rehearsed in orchestra was also being analyzed for theory class, studied in history class, and the concerts promoted, documented, and produced by the students themselves? That’s just one idea among many, but the goal is the same: to consolidate the demands facing our students. Rather than ask them to attend to countless, apparently unrelated tasks, we ask them to have a richer, more integrated experience: to focus just a bit more.

One of the things that makes community so elusive is it can’t be imposed. The dean can’t launch a program designed to foster community and expect it to have much impact. Community must emerge from the grass roots of people and their shared experiences. Rituals can be a powerful fertilizer for those roots, provided they emerge out of a sense of empathy, respect, and value for the individual. Rituals also require space– in terms of both time and mental energy. (You can now see how focus and community can and should live synergistically with one another.) Be observant: students already have myriad rituals, conscious and otherwise. How might those rituals become traditions? Perhaps it starts during freshman orientation; perhaps the milestones of the academic year can help spur a cadence of rituals. But none of these are useful if the process isn’t open, transparent, student-driven, fun, and as non-institutionalized as possible.

Our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are obviously woven into the notion of community as well. A true community values, embraces, and celebrates everyone; a true community revels in its diversity; empathy drives understanding and the discovery of new connections between individuals. DEI is of course an expansive subject in its own right, but I mention it because, like rituals and traditions, a “program” administered from On High is not going to do much to foster a truly diverse and inclusive environment. A gardener can plant the finest specimens available, but if the soil is terrible and never gets watered, the plants will wither. Many of our DEI efforts amount to planting something with great fanfare in soil that hasn’t been prepared and isn’t taken care of. Community works the same way.

I’ve been in my current position for 15 years, and the single most profound change I’ve witnessed during that time is the staggering surge in mental health crises in our students. The causes are many: the COVID-19 pandemic, financial stresses of going to college, existential dread over the state of our planet. And while focus and community alone can’t remedy these issues, the lack of them unquestionably adds to the problem. Finding ways to bring focus and community into our institutions might go a long way to helping our students– and ourselves– be a little less stressed, and a little more inspired.