Borrowing Harvard's Blueprint

A year and a half ago, a group of students, professors and administrators from Middlebury College came to Harvard to find out how A. Lawrence Lowell's 70-year-old House experiment might be replicated elsewhere.

In meetings with deans, students and House masters, Middlebury representatives asked how they could create more representative residential communities and reduce the influence of special interest housing.

In response to increased binge drinking, the homogenization of residential communities and a renewed interest in intellectual life outside the classroom, many liberal arts schools are moving back towards this in loco parentis view of college administration prevalent before the 1960s.

Cornell, Dartmouth and Wesleyan have also moved away from elective, themed residential spaces like fraternities and sororities and toward more structured systems like those at Harvard and Yale.

And the House system which drew protests from students when it was first created, and again when randomization was implemented, has suddenly become en vogue at liberal arts schools which once treated housing as a personal decision.

Educational Communities

The Harvard model--and those like it--stem from the idea that housing is properly considered one of many areas in which there are lessons for students to learn and for faculty to teach.

Educational Communities

As House advocates see it, the liberal arts education was first conceived at the turn of the century as a formative project. While any school could teach a student information, the liberal arts school would attempt to fashion an entire human being. It was a broad mandate, and it has brought educational institutions into repeated conflict with their adolescent charges, eager for more autonomous lifestyles.

At Harvard, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says he is not disturbed if the College's method of assigning groups of students to Houses makes them uncomfortable--he sees mild discomfort as evidence that students are learning how to live with other people.

"It's a big transition between living at home with family members, to living with people you've never met before," he says. "It opens students' eyes to things they haven't experienced before, some of which they may find uncomfortable."

On the other hand, students, and some masters and tutors, have said students' residences are a personal space where the college educational imperative should not intrude. This camp sees the Houses as retreats from the rigors of Harvard's academics.

Many tutors of color were in this camp when the college first proposed assigning first-year students to Houses randomly. They charged that, in a predominately white university, students of color needed to congregate to achieve a critical mass and comfort level.

Becoming Like Harvard

For many years, Harvard's treatment of residential life as a component of the educational experience to be shaped by administrators has been unusual.

Becoming Like Harvard

One of the lasting consequences of the unrest of the late 1960s was the removal of adult authority from the lives of undergraduates at many colleges. And, as a consequence, residential communities developed much as students themselves wanted them to.

At Cornell, conflict between black students and the administration saw the creation in 1972 of Ujamaa, a house for black students whose purpose is to help black students "learn more about the economic and political forces that help perpetuate racism; and build the leadership skills necessary to create strategies and programs to eradicate racism," according to the house website.

Cornell has similar residential houses for, among others, Native Americans and Latino students.Wesleyan, which calls itself "diversity university," is the home of Malcolm X house, where no white students live.And Dartmouth administrators have seen, in recent years, a homogenization of the college's housing--which, they say is increasingly divided into sub-populations of relatively similar students.

More and more, administrators at these colleges are feeling discomfort in facing campus residential systems which they say are not reflective of the experiences that students can expect to encounter in the real world.

Last year, Dartmouth President James Wright announced the end of the Greek system "as we know it," and said that, after 158 years of single-sex Greek life, fraternities and sororities would have to go coed.

Administrators at Dartmouth say they proposed the move away from a Greek system because of concerns about binge drinking, and because they thought it would improve a student's education to live with a broader cross-section of his or her peers.

"The way I think about it, you're buying a product, which is education," says Dartmouth's Dean of Residential Life Martin W. Redmond. "It's defined as residentially based. Both the in, and the out-of-classroom experience is the entire product."

At Cornell, President Hunter R. Rawlings proposed forbidding first-year students from living in theme houses such as Ujamma and instead housing the entire class in yet-to-be constructed campus housing.

"He wanted to create this big residential experience," says Aron B. Goetzl, editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun. "He wanted to generate a lot of interaction in the dorms and where you live, but you should have the right to chose that and where it happens."

These moves toward Harvard-style housing have been met with resistance, however.

In the weeks following Dartmouth's announcement, a thousand students marched on Wright's personal home to protest the change and alumni groups came out in opposition to it. A poll conducted by the Dartmouth, the campus' student newspaper, found that 83 percent of students supported single-sex Greek organizations.

The massive opposition forced a re-consideration of the decision, and Dartmouth administrators approved a plan in which Greek organizations would remain single-sex and residential, but called for centralized housing for first-years, and the enhancement of a system of "clusters" smaller residential communities that may come to resemble the Houses at Harvard and the Colleges at Yale.

Cornell's proposal--which would have allowed students to join theme houses, but not during their first year--met with widespread opposition. Again, evoking the ideas of privacy and self-determination, students were up in arms. A few went on a hunger strike.

In a series of public statements, Rawlings backed away from his earlier plan. While first-year students will still be required to live on campus, Rawlings pledged his support to the continued operation of the themed houses.

When a housing shortage at Wesleyan led the administration to house white students in an under-filled Malcolm X house, the subsequent protests led them to renege on the decision.

For students, these sorts of interventions are very personal intrusions. For administrators, there is nothing to intrude upon--the residential system never belonged to the students in the first place, it was simply one more place outside of the classroom where learning took place. For them, if the liberal arts education is to be a complete experience, it cannot be relegated to the classroom. It must be a constant presence during a student's four years and to deny the college's access to the residential system is to deny the principle of immersion that is so crucial to the liberal arts education in the first place.

Facing the Challenges

Facing the Challenges

But while Harvard's residential communities are diverse in the ways other schools hope to emulate, they are also fractured.

Masters have reported consistent difficulties integrating incoming sophomores into House communities. Last year, in response, the Committee on House Life slashed the size of blocking groups from 16 students to eight, hoping the smaller size would force students to get to know others in their house.

"Tight groups of 16 made no effort to branch out," says Thomas A. Dingman '67, associate dean of the College for human resources and the House system. "The masters felt there was so little inclination to meet new people, so we shouldn't make it so easy."

And without any single theme for residents to unify around, there is less of a basis for coherent community."You have to have something around which you create this community in the Houses," says Gary J. Schwarzmueller, the executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers. "If there isn't a theme, there's less likelihood of people finding something that's common to connect."

Absent any theme for students to rally around, the creation of cohesive residential communities is left to the talents and efforts of the individual adults in residence--in Harvard's case, the House masters.

"On the masters will depend, more than anything else, the success of the project. The atmosphere, the aspirations, the enjoyment of the Houses, will take their tone from them," President Lowell wrote in 1929.

Today, this has become a gargantuan task. While other schools' moves toward House-like communities might prevent special interest balkanization and allow for greater supervision of drinking, at Harvard community spirit has proven more difficult to build.

Students, to say nothing of faculty, have far more commitments than they once did, and precious little time to devote to the life of the House.