Does the archives represent Mount Holyoke College as a community?

Kristin Raines

From the materials I have looked at in the MHC Archives, I am not given the impression of a community, but rather a number of individual lives which are all linked by Mount Holyoke as an institution. Each document refers to one person's life and is typically relevant only to that person's life, not necessarily to the school as a whole. The very nature of artifacts that were created by individual people is that they were intended for private purposes which did not involve the community at large.

On the other hand, materials that were produced by the school administration have a very omniscient kind of tone to them, which does not come off as the warm, fuzziness which we want "community" to be. (Bauman, 2001) This supports the proposition that in trying to create the warm and fuzzy community we all want, an unfeeling bureaucracy forms instead; that is the irony of "community" and it is reflected in MHC administrative documents.

These two very separate kinds of viewpoints present in the archives make it very difficult for me to get a sense of Mount Holyoke as a whole, real community. It comes off more as being an outside administrative body with an innumerable amount of separate and unrelated lives running around beneath its shadow. While each person whose records are kept in the MHC Archives has a connection to Mount Holyoke, it is hard for me to find connections between any of them, much less between the individuals and the larger bureaucracy at work. Therefore I have not found that the archives represents Mount Holyoke as a community, but rather draws light onto different perspectives within it.