Uniting Town and Gown : Federal grant will help Occidental College hold ‘conversations’ with its diverse neighborhood. : HEARTS OF THE CITY: Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news.

Tahe communities surrounding Occidental College are a demographic crazy quilt. Latinos, whites and Asian Americans live there. So do students and senior citizens, poor people and the well-to-do.

Often, the groups live in separate micro-communities, rarely taking the time to sit down and chat.

That’s why administrators at Occidental College decided to apply for a national grant to help residents on and off the Eagle Rock campus engage in structured discussions about what it means to be an American in an era when divisions appear to be deepening and unity seems to be on the wane.

“It’s to bring people together,” said John J. Bak, the college’s assistant director of corporate and foundation relations and government grants. “I really think it’s about the most important thing we can be doing as a community--engaging in a constructive public dialogue.”

The yearlong series of “conversations,” ranging from one-on-one oral history interviews to town hall meetings, will be supported by a $35,000 grant awarded last month by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The grant’s aim is to bring together diverse groups of people through activities involving the humanities--academic disciplines such as history, art and literature that traditionally have stressed commonalities among humans.

The agency has awarded more than $4.2 million in “national conversation” grants since March, including two others in Southern California--one to support a series of KPCC radio broadcasts on race relations and one to support a San Bernardino historical production about democracy.

The Occidental College program, called “Conversations With the Past, Present and Future in Los Angeles,” is not a classroom academic exercise. It will attempt to spur dialogue by engaging Eagle Rock and Highland Park residents in activities including a bus tour, a soccer match and a documentary film.

Bak, who helped plan the series of 18 major conversations, leaned forward at his desk and displayed his mechanism for involving those who live in the area--a two-page list of contacts and phone numbers compiled on notebook paper.

“The purpose is for people to learn about each other,” Bak said. “We really want the whole community to be involved.”

But winning public involvement isn’t easy. Bak, along with other project supporters, is concerned that Americans in Los Angeles and elsewhere are not participating in social activities the way they used to.

Not only have voter turnout and PTA involvement dropped nationwide, but there are even signs of social disintegration in, of all places, the nation’s bowling alleys, Bak said.

He was citing a January article in the Journal of Democracy by Harvard University international affairs professor Robert D. Putnam, who wrote that “the most whimsical yet discomforting bit of evidence of social disengagement” is that, although more Americans are bowling than ever before, membership in bowling leagues has dropped 40% since 1980.

The conversations aim to do something about that. One is scheduled to take place in a bowling alley after a tournament. A professor there will lead a discussion based on Putnam’s article, and one of the questions planned to kick-start the discussion reads, “Why should we be concerned about ‘civic engagement’ in the first place?”

One professor who is to lead conversations said the American trend toward less participation has spread to Eagle Rock and Highland Park--a win for individualism but a possible loss for the functioning of democratic society.

“Increasingly, we do things in isolation,” said Eric Newhall, a professor of American studies and English who lives in Eagle Rock. “A lot of people don’t even know their neighbors these days.”

Gloria Sierra, principal of Eagle Rock Junior/Senior High School, said the general reluctance of people to talk with each other nowadays is partly because the population appears busier than ever before.

“There is a need for people, in the true community sense, to be aware of each other,” said Sierra, who has agreed to help involve her students in the conversation series.

The first conversation will begin later this month as an on-campus Internet interchange among Occidental students, faculty and alumni, to be followed by an in-person public forum on campus, at which participants will discuss their impressions and prepare for the rest of the year.

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Each discussion will be guided by a four-person panel of two residents, one faculty member and a professional facilitator from the city attorney’s office to help guide dialogue in a constructive direction.

The off-campus public’s involvement will begin in January with a mapping exercise, in which students from elementary to high school are to ask themselves and others where they feel most comfortable, where they spend most of their time and where, if anywhere, they feel unwelcome.

The populations of Eagle Rock and Highland Park are racially mixed, with the largest proportion in both areas being Latino. Residents say cultural barriers sometimes impede communication.

There are economic barriers as well in the neighborhoods, where housing runs the gamut from lowland apartment complexes with barred windows to substantial hillside homes with lush lawns and private security systems.

Finally, there is the time-honored barrier between town and gown. While some of the 1,600 students who study at Occidental participate in volunteer projects, most usually have little reason to share thoughts about scholarship with off-campus residents.

“We want to talk to people outside the college . . . to build some intellectual bridges,” said John N. Swift, associate dean of the faculty and a professor of English who is interested in the cultural history of Los Angeles.

Swift plans to help lead the initial 40-person bus tour of the area as well as a writing workshop for high school students.

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All the sessions are not intended to be lectures, but mutual explorations that help residents understand each other.

In a description of the grants, the federal agency indicated that building understanding is a difficult task with no simple answers, but of vital importance to the nation.

The National Conversation, the description said, aims to help Americans “explore the nature of our diverse society, our identity as Americans, and the evolving ideal suggested by our nation’s motto, E pluribus unum : Out of many, one.”

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The Beat

Today’s centerpiece story is about an Occidental College program to initiate a series of conversations with the community. People who are interested in getting involved in the conversation series can call (213) 259-2804.