Life at Vanderbilt University soon may be very, very different. After many months of study, the university appears headed toward the introduction of “residential colleges,” a concept that involves, among other things, students and faculty living together in autonomous college settings.
Total cost for the project, which would mean a reengineering of many of the university’s dormitories and dining halls, as well as an endowment for the programming, is expected to be in the range of $100 million to $200 million over the next 10 years. The university’s board of trust is said to be very supportive of the idea.
The concept of residential colleges is an old one, dating to Oxford and Cambridge in England. They are most closely identified in the United States with Harvard and Yale, but Rice University, the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania all have residential colleges. The idea is not just that students and faculty live together in close quarters, but that the colleges themselves grow into independent hubs of academic and extracurricular activities. In a residential college system, therefore, the substantial amount of time that students spend outside of the classroom becomes more enriching.
“The entire four-year model involves tremendous cultural changes here,” says Susan Barge, Vanderbilt’s associate dean of undergraduate admissions, who has been deeply involved in developing the idea. “The essence of this is that we have more questions than answers at this point, but we really feel this is something we’re going to go forward with.”
Adds Nick Zeppos, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs: “A lot of people have talked about it being transformative.”
In a 23-page “Report on Residential Colleges at Vanderbilt University: Creating a Learning Community for Students and Faculty,” published in fall 2000, four attributes of a residential college structure at Vanderbilt were outlined:
♦ “Students and faculty reside together in the residential halls; other faculty are affiliated with the residential college;
♦ “Faculty in residence and affiliated faculty engage with students in planning programs and co-curricular activities through the residential college;
♦ “Programming and extracurricular activities within the residential college include a wide range of intellectual, academic, social, cultural, artistic and athletic events and activities.
♦ “The residential colleges maximize the opportunity for educating, mentoring and challenging a student in all aspects of intellectual and personal growth.”
As currently envisioned, each residential college would include approximately 300 students, sophomores through seniors. All Vanderbilt freshmen, meanwhile, would continue to live in a freshmen-only setting, which is standard policy. But the freshmen would become “affiliated” with particular colleges during their first year and attend events there. They would then enter the respective colleges their sophomore year and spend the next three years there.
Each college would include a smattering of students from the university’s four undergraduate schools: engineering, arts and sciences, Peabody (education) and Blair (music). Each college would have its own common areas, study areas and dining hall, the latter of which could likely be used for other events such as concerts or lectures. Dormitory rooms probably would vary for undergraduates, so that a student might begin sophomore year in a smaller room and grow into a larger room in successive years. Each college would likely have its own intramural sports teams. According to Zeppos, individual colleges might have different attractions, with one having a theater, another having photography darkrooms and so on.
Importantly, the colleges would become their own extracurricular centers, with an emphasis on developing intellectual life outside the classroom. “At other universities,” the report says, “the residential colleges are places for distinguished guest speakers, debates, film series, theatre productions, musical groups, athletic teams, book clubs, reading groups and a host of other activities driven by both student and faculty interest.”
In September 1999, the university appointed a committee to investigate the idea of residential colleges. The plan got a huge boost in February 2000, with the arrival of current Chancellor Gordon Gee. He has embraced the idea and pushed the discussion forward to include more students, faculty and administrators.
If there have been detractors, they are mostly students. Some don’t like the idea of being forced to live in a particular setting for three years; they want to maintain a choice as to where they live. “Instead of leaving students free to find and create their own niches,” wrote Jacob Grier, editor in chief of The Torch, a conservative-leaning campus publication, “they place everyone into the same model of student life.” Writing in the liberal-leaning Orbis, Jenni Gilbert reported that “the campus buzz surrounding residential colleges is surprisingly unenthusiastic,” owing to reasons related to the potential weakening of the Greek system and detraction from the attractiveness of the campus.
Regarding the university’s fraternities and sororities, detractors argue that the Greek system will be diminished in a residential college system because more social activities will emanate instead from the individual residential colleges themselves. Proponents, meanwhile, say that the residential colleges and the Greek system can coexist. They also acknowledge that Vanderbilt will have a relatively easy time adjusting to a residential college system because so few people live in the campus’ fraternities and sororities.
Under the plan’s latest version, Vanderbilt would not introduce its first residential college until the year 2006 as part of a phased-in effort. The long wait is in part because most people acknowledge more folks need to be pulled into the process and understand how the new system would work. As well, it’s just a huge undertaking.
“The resistance I’m hearing is more a function of not knowing what it’s about,” explains Barge, who is herself a 1981 Vanderbilt graduate. “At first, I didn’t understand residential colleges, but now I’m a complete convert.”
Zeppos says part of the beauty of residential colleges is that they dovetail perfectly with Vanderbilt’s layout, student population and mission. “We’re built on a great campus, with a great sense of community and civility, with people from engineering, arts and science, music, law and medicine. So getting people like that together in and out of the classroom would be wonderful.”
