For the second July in a row, my husband and I are with George Mason University students studying abroad in Oxford University’s Exeter College. Oxford, founded six hundred years before America’s oldest university, clearly has roots in the past. But I see lessons for the future in the way it operates.

Oxford was built around a culture of community. Student scholars eat with members of their own college — the largest only 741 students. Oxford tutors, who were not allowed to marry until the Victorian era, originally lived and ate in the colleges where they taught, encouraging intellectual discourse at mealtimes.