My friend Martin saw this sign while walking down the street in Chicago. He thought of me, snapped the picture, and emailed it.
I don’t mean to pick on the fine people at Roosevelt University, which I’m sure is a wonderful school. They felt they needed a slogan, and they probably hired a marketing firm to come up with something, paid them way too much money, and ended up with this. It’s what a lot of schools do, particularly as more and more of them are headed by administrations that think a school shouldn’t actually be run like a school, but rather should be run like a business. My own school, Towson University, did the same thing shortly before I arrived here in 2001. They dropped the word 
State from their name, added a fancy new logo that looks something like an accidental paint smear from a semi-dry brush, and got themselves a slogan. I think the latest one is Towson: Thinking Outside. I guess the marketing firm that dreamed it up thought it would be clever to leave off “The Box.” Nothing like turning a lame, business-speak cliche into a witty pun for the purpose of branding your university.
So no, I’m not picking on Roosevelt University for having a nonsensical slogan. Plenty of fine institutions have nonsensical slogans. But I have written a book on the nature and decline of communities in America, so I just can’t let this particular nonsensical slogan go by without contributing a few thoughts.
Let us ponder this sentiment for a moment: A Community of Individuals.
I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say this is on a par, with: A Book of Pages or perhaps, A Song of Notes.
The initial reaction is, well duh, of course a book has pages. Of course a song has notes. 
What’s more, we can go so far as to say that on some level, that’s the whole point of a book: to bind together many pages in a certain order to create a greater whole; that’s the whole point of a song: to bring together many notes in a certain combination to create the greater whole. So the intense obviousness of A Community of Individuals is almost mind-numbing.
But it goes deeper than that. In at least one way, the phrase A Community of Individuals is similar to this: A Church of Atheists.
Because a community isn’t just about getting a bunch of individuals together and arranging them into a greater whole. Gathering up individuals, hanging a bunch of labels on them, sticking them in a shared space, and calling the thing a community doesn’t magically make them one. Because while any community is of course made up of individuals, just as a song is made up of notes, it’s really much deeper and more complex than that.
The notes in a song only make up a song because they relate to each other. That b-flat isn’t just a b-flat. It’s part of a chord, a melody, a harmony, a rhythm. It is part of a certain key 
(maybe the key of F major), and is not party of other keys (like say e minor), and if you’re going to stick it where it doesn’t normally belong, you’re going to have to make sense of it within the logic of the song’s structure. Steve Martin once joked that fast bluegrass banjo music is a great bargain because you get more notes to the dollar than any other genre. That joke was funny in part because of the absurdity of the idea that music is just a bunch of notes. Of course it’s not. It’s about the inspired and intentional selection and arrangement of notes. A song is about the relationship all the notes have to each other.
In much the same way, a community is not defined simply by the individual members who comprise it. Rather, a community is defined by the many different relationships that its members form with each other. A bunch of people in the same place don’t automatically produce a community any more than a bunch of musical notes played one after another automatically create a song.
A collection of musical notes requires many other elements to bind them together to create a song. The notes themselves are not a song until they have their relationships more sharply defined with things such as rhythm and harmony. Likewise, a collection of individuals requires multiple sets of relationships to bind them together into a community. A school is not enough. Indeed, in a real community a school would be just one of many elements defining complex relationships among individual members. Others might include a church, a workplace, and a market.
So no, Roosevelt University, despite the money they’ve spent on the slogan and the all the stationary it probably it appears on, is not a community of individuals, which is a rather ridiculous and meaningless assertion anyway. And fundamentally it is not a community at all. Rather, it might aspire to be a part of an actual, thriving community, something so complex that no marketing company can message it into existence.