From SAGESWiki

The SAGES café provides a comfortable, accessible space for the SAGES program, where students, faculty, staff, and visitors can come to feel at home and to get their bearings. It acts as a social hub in immediate proximity to actual seminars and the SAGES administration. The SAGES café, where discussion groups can schedule meetings or spring up spontaneously, is the public face of SAGES: a place where you can get any information you need about the SAGES program and curriculum, as well as a place to rest, to think, and to be refreshed.

Contents 1 A physical center for SAGES 2 Why a café? 3 What makes a great "third place"? 4 Great coffee 5 The café crew 6 Bibliography

A physical center for SAGES

"SAGES" as an entity embraces a tremendous number of wide-ranging, interconnected parts. It incorporates curriculum requirements, a set of ideals and standards for a variety of different courses and classroom experiences, a philosophy for undergraduate education, and the many discrete experiences of every SAGES student and instructor. Without a physical anchor, such a large and diffuse structure can feel hazy and unreal; the component elements don't necessarily come together in people's minds as a single coherent whole.

A physical location for SAGES Central -- a single place, strongly identified with the program -- makes SAGES concrete. That concreteness gives the program an important institutional and social reality. SAGES becomes more than a label for certain requirements and certain courses: it's somewhere you can go. Providing a clear physical center for SAGES means that incoming students and their parents can have something tangible in mind when they think about what SAGES is and why Case has created it. Current students, faculty, and staff can enjoy a proprietary sense of SAGES not just as a program at their university but as a real place that they inhabit.

In addition to the psychological value of providing a physical anchor for the SAGES program, a central SAGES space is immensely useful for the ways it supports easy, frequent, in-person contact. Because it is public, because it is consolidated, and because there are many excellent reasons for people to go there at many different times of the day, SAGES Central brings people into contact with one another in a wealth of fortuitous and unpredictable ways. As so many people in the SAGES community circulate through the same space, the opportunities for the chance encounters which leaven the ordinary bread of university life are great. And SAGES staff will never be isolated from the day-to-day experiences of SAGES students and faculty, because those daily experiences will so often occur right on their doorstep.

Why a café?

Giving people reasons to come and to stay: All the benefits that come from grounding SAGES in a concrete physical location don't do much good if that location is barren and far from the bustle of daily life. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs has described the importance of mixed primary uses for the vitality of city neighborhoods: On successful city streets, people must appear at different times and for different purposes. Different groups of people, following their own varying and interweaving dances of activity, unconsciously cooperate to support "more convenience, liveliness, variety and choice" than any one group could support on its own. And in fact "the enterprises that [they] are capable of supporting, mutually, draw out... many more residents than would emerge if the place were moribund. And, in a modest way, they also attract still another crowd in addition to the local residents or local workers. They attract people who want a change from their neighborhoods." (153)In the same way, the café and the other elements of SAGES Central support one another. Students will be more likely to consult SAGES staff because the café brings them nearby; seats at the café will fill with people spilling out of seminars; and the whole space will add up to more than the sum of its parts.

The special position of the "storekeeper": In the bustling personal-but-impersonal rhythms of campus activity, as in the streets of a big city, proprietors of public establishments occupy a special position. Repositories of the knowledge that comes from being always on site, they are accessible, familiar figures who nonetheless retain a certain distance. The SAGES café staff are patently not interested in providing grades or passing judgment. To illustrate, another (rather lengthy) parallel discussion from Jane Jacobs:

A good city street achieves a marvel of balance between its people's determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted.

Perhaps I can best explain this subtle but all-important balancein terms of the stores where people leave keys for their friends, a common custom in New York. In our family, for example, when a friend wants to use our place while we are away for a weekend or everyone happens to be out during the day, or a visitor for whom we do not wish to wait up is spending the night, we tell such a friend that he can pick up the key at the delicatessen across the street. Joe Cornacchia, who keeps the delicatessen, usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He has a special drawer for them.

Now why do I, and many others, select Joe as a logical custodian for keys? Because we trust him, first, to be a responsible custodian, but equally important because we know that he combines a feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs. Joe considers it no concern of his whom we choose to permit in our places and why.

Around on the other side of our block, people leave their keys at a Spanish grocery. On the other side of Joe's block, people leave them at the candy store. Down a block they leave them at the coffee shop, and a few hundred feet around the corner from that, in a barber shop. Around one corner from two fashionable blocks of town houses and apartments in the Upper East Side, people leave their keys in a butcher shop and a bookshop; around another corner they leave them in a cleaner's and a drug store." (59-60)

In this environment, proprietors of meeting places like a café, where anyone is free to linger indefinitely or to run in and out at will, maintain the balance of public and private with ease. The commercial meeting place puts customers and proprietors in frequent contact: the café staffer is in a position to observe and assist the people who come in and out every day, in an unforced and unobtrusive way. It is perhaps a perfect system for providing undergraduate support of a casual kind -- the kind of advising that one might easily forgo if it felt at all awkward or troublesome to seek it out, but which goes a long way toward making life easier and more comfortable.

Third places: A café, unlike an office, a classroom, or a dormitory, is a place that is neither work nor home. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term "third place" to describe these kinds of public spaces, sees them as the heart of communities' social vigor, democratic culture, and intellectual vitality. The central ingredient of a "third place" is that people are motivated to go there because it is fun. Third places serve simultaneously as neutral territory and the source of strong feelings of ownership. The denizens of a successful third place have a real claim to that place. It is an escape from both home and work, a neutral ground where people may meet on equal terms.

By the nature of their informality and lack of a barrier to entry, third places are inclusive and encourage free talk and free association. They serve simultaneously as neutral territory and as the repository of strong feelings of ownership. The denizens of a successful third place have a real (communal) claim to that place. Perhaps the most famous of these places, illustrating their potential for intellectual stimulation and community-building, are the coffeehouses in Europe and elsewhere that have long provided fora for political dissent. But English pubs, German beer gardens, Italian piazzas, taverns, and old-fashioned main streets all also function as third places -- and this is what makes them so appealing.

What makes a great "third place"?

These items deserve greater elaboration with respect to their significance for the SAGES café, but for now we present a bare list of characteristic qualities from Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place and let them speak for themselves:

• They are neutral ground. "There must be places where individuals may come and go as they please, in which none are required to play host, and in which all feel at home and comfortable.... Many, perhaps most, neighbors will never meet, to say nothing of associate, for there is no place for them to do so. Where neutral ground is available it makes possible far more informal, even intimate, relations among people." (22-23)
• They are "levelers" -- they "counter the tendency to be restrictive in the enjoyment of others by being open to all and by laying emphasis on qualities not confined to status distinctions current in the society." (24)* The mood is playful.
• They are accessible and accommodating. The best third places are near one's work or home, and open for long hours: "It must be thus, for the third place accommodates people only when they are released from their responsibilities elsewhere... Those who have third places exhibit regularity in their visits to them, but it is not that punctual and unfailing kind shown in deference to the job or family. The timing is loose, days are missed, some visits are brief, etc.... Correspondingly, the activity that goes on in third places is largely unplanned, unscheduled, unorganized, and unstructured. Here, however, is the charm." (32-33)
• They have regulars.
• They have a relatively low profile physically -- rather than the slickness of chain establishments, they are relatively modest, inviting those who frequent them to feel at ease, unpretentious, and never upstaged by their surroundings.
• They provide a "home away from home."Some of these elements are prerequisites for a successful third place, while others are symptoms of a place's success.

Great coffee

The SAGES café serves Peet's coffee and tea, prepared according to the exacting standards that Peet's insists on. Peet's beans are hand-roasted to order, and both our espresso and American-style coffee machines are carefully calibrated to draw just the right amount of flavor from the beans. All our other ingredients are also of the highest quality, and every drink is prepared with care. There are no compromises that would undermine the quality of our drinks. For example, our chai latte is made not from a bottled concentrate, but from a fresh-brewed base made from scratch every day on site.

We also serve a selection of additional food and drink, including gourmet sodas; sandwiches, salads, and sweets you won't find anywhere else on campus; and bagels from local favorite Bialy's. You can also buy packages of Peet's coffee and tea (in 12 custom-blended varieties) to take home and brew at your leisure.

See our full menu (PDF).

Social Responsibility: One of the coffees the café will offer, Fair Trade Blend, is a certified fair trade coffee. But Peet's stands by the sustainability of all of its beans. While not all of their growers qualify for Fair Trade certification, Peet's always pursues long-term, sustainable partnerships. The premium coffees Peet's buys command prices well above Fair Trade minimums, and Peet's also collaborates actively with groups such as Coffee Kids and Global Education Partnership, which work to improve the quality of life in coffee-growing communities.

For more information, see Peet's online materials on the subject.

The café crew

The SAGES café coordinators oversee the operations of the SAGES café and cultural center. This position serves as a first line of contact with the SAGES undergraduate program for prospective students and their parents, current students, visiting scholars, and donors. The coordinators oversee the day-to-day operations of the café, answer questions about SAGES, and serve as the cafés barista. The café will also employ student workers to assist with café and administrative work.

Aloha! from your "Sagista" Rebecca

I'm Loretta, the P.M. "Sagista"

Bibliography

Jacobs, Jane. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities." New York: Vintage.

Oldenburg, Ray. (1996 [1989]). The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. 2nd ed. New York: Marlowe & Company.