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This study examines the messages that a university transmits to prospective students during a particular ritual-the campus tour. Specifically, the article discusses the ways that members ofa university communicate their expectations with respect to becoming contributing members of the academic community. Three community discourses serve as the theoretical foundation for the analysis. The conclusion discusses ways that rituals could be examined and modified to create multicultural and democratic communities.
During the 1996 fall semester, I attended many university-sanctioned, start-of-the-year events including the campus tour, convocation, the international students' orientation program, a day-long new faculty orientation meeting, the first football game, and life in three different classrooms during the first day of classes on Miami University's Oxford campus.' This article reports on a portion of this research project focusing exclusively on the campus tour. Following this introduction, I describe the campus tour and then analyze it to better understand the intentions of organizers of the campus rituals, the various higher education discourses about community, and the relationships between rituals and community.
An examination of the campus tour narrative offers researchers numerous interpretive possibilities. Given the scope of this article, I examine a single analytical theme: the use of rituals to conjure a sense of community. I devote the remainder of this analysis to a two-fold agenda. First, I examine the ways the campus tour ritual persuades prospective students to believe that if they enroll, they will be members of a unique academic community. Second, and more importantly, the analysis will reveal the implicit beliefs and values that guide tour organizers as they convey what is the "normal" student role within this academic community.
Data for this study were gathered three ways: participant-observations (see Jorgensen 1989; Sanger 1996; Spradley 1980) of numerous public events; in-depth unstructured interviews (see Fontana and Frey 1994; Schatzman and Strauss 1973; Spradley 1979) with ritual organizers and participants; and analysis of written and audiovisual artifacts (see Hodder 1994), such as the promotional materials that target prospective students. These three distinct yet complementary fieldwork methods (i.e., participant-observations, interviews, and document analysis) and data sources (places, people, things) illuminate the multiple ways that the university, the Admission Office staff, prospective students, and I made meaning of the campus tour.
This study is influenced...