“Community and Diversity” by Rebekah Nathan focuses on the changing definition of the word community on college campuses and how that change impacts how students spend their free time and interact with other students. While campus directors create and promote college living communities with good intentions of providing every student with interesting activities and helping first-time students make the leap from home to college life, large communities usually take away only the little time free left during the day and make students feel more isolated and alone. The requirement for students to participate in every activity on campus in order to form a healthy university life community pushes students further and further away from organized groups and makes the formation of small exclusive social networks even more desirable. Early in his essay "Community and Diversity," Nathan notes that most students feel a sense of togetherness in only three areas: "age, pop culture, and a handful of (recent) historical events" (Nathan 101), areas that don't exactly function as bonds that unite. Even as campuses pour more resources and energy into trying to engage students and create a functioning community, many students instead choose to set aside time for themselves and small groups of friends, abandoning the large, time-constrained group for networks of “ individualism, spontaneity, freedom and choice” (Nathan 105). While these self-centered groups often overlap, they rarely have identical matches, as each student creates their own network based on proximity and similar interests. Many groups consist entirely of a single ethnicity or include only one or two people of different races. Although the large, organized form of the campus… half of the paper… the purpose and motivation: to provide social structure, educate, or simply retain the majority of freshmen? While a large-scale community can offer students multiple activities to fill their days, it simply cannot provide each student with the personal care and attention they need. Although Nathan conducts brilliant observational research in her essay “Community and Diversity,” she merely scratches the surface of the situation, reporting on the evidence around her, but without getting to the heart of the problem. Students today require a deeper understanding from other students, an understanding they cannot have in a large community. Instead of waiting for small-scale college programming to arrive, students need to take matters into their own hands, and their best interests, and create small, private networks that meet their individual needs..