The Collegiate Landscape of the Future
Robert J. O’Hara
(rjohara@post.harvard.edu)
Here, as in furnaces of boiling gold,
Stars dipt, come back, full as their orbs can hold
Of glitt’ring light.
—Richard Blackmore ,
Prince Arthur
I was an undergraduate at the
University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a large public institution
not unlike hundreds of others around the United States and around
the world. As a freshman I lived in a crummy 1960s-era cement-block
dormitory where I had to walk around pools of vomit to get to the
bathroom, where I never saw anyone under 18 or over 22, and
where I met about five people. I moved out at the end of
my freshman year and never went into another campus
dormitory again. In the end I received a good classroom
education at UMass, and as a zoology major I made friends with many
other zoologists, both students and faculty. But after four years
of college I didn’t know any artists, I didn’t know any
business majors, I didn’t know any philosophers, I didn’t
know any chemists, I didn’t know any musicians.
Twenty years later as a faculty member at another large public
university, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I asked
the students what it was like living in campus dormitories. I heard
answers like these:
I have spent one semester here and can honestly say that it has
been the worst
living experience of my life.… At any moment early morning
or late at night I might be woken up, kept awake, or kept from
studying by people screaming and running down the hall, a stereo
cranked with the door wide open, or a party going on in the room
beside me.
The noise and commotion from the residents makes studying
impossible and has affected my academic progress severely.… I feel
that the pests, inconsiderate neighbors, and the noise factor would
discourage anyone from living [on campus].… I found the conditions
to be unbearable and
unacceptable.
This is the first time I have ever lived in a dorm, and in many
ways it has not been a very pleasant experience. Beer is
everywhere. The noise lasts until two or three o’clock in the
morning on some days, not counting weekends. My fellow residents
have been very inconsiderate—leaving trash and other
filth all over the building, especially the
bathroom, blaring music at all times of the day, and just generally
being loud.
It is not uncommon to get up in the morning after receiving
little to no sleep to find the hall vandalized and floor covered
with beer, blood, glass, and other filth.
Over the many years that these disgraceful conditions have
existed, where have the adults been who were
supposedly in charge of student life? Most of them have been on the
other side of campus in well-appointed offices, from which they
emerge a few times each year to exercise what one of them referred
to as “symbolic leadership.” And lest anyone think this problem has
been confined to public universities, William Willimon and Thomas
Naylor have reported the same situation at a large private
university in their important book
The Abandoned Generation.
An entire generation of students have been
cheated out of the college experience they deserve. This
should be a source of shame and embarrassment to university
faculty, and a source of outrage to students, parents, taxpayers,
and state legislators.
1. Seeing the Light
My first
experience with residential colleges began in
graduate school when I became a member of Dudley House, one of the
residential colleges at Harvard University. In Dudley House I made
friends with writers and doctors, had lunch with physicists and
Shakespeare scholars, discussed literary theory around the pool
table for hours, and was presented with a wide range of
opportunities to do good by serving the college
community. These experiences opened my eyes: why weren’t my
undergraduate years like this? Why don’t all students have this
sort of experience at every university? It was obvious from what I
saw that this could be done anywhere. Harvard is a wealthy
institution, it is true, but the only things needed were dining
rooms, and dormitories, and students and faculty, and most
universities have all these things. What Harvard did that my
undergraduate institution did not do was arrange its
resources correctly.
Some years later at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro I had the opportunity to establish a new residential
college named Cornelia
Strong College. In just a few short years, with little
institutional support and very few resources, a glorious
community of students, faculty, and staff developed, a
community filled with loyalty, tradition, generosity,
wit,
intelligence, imagination,
and service,
a community that stood in stark contrast to much
of the rest of the campus. The quotations that opened this section
about beer, blood, and filth were replaced with comments like
these:
It’s the greatest home-away-from-home anyone could ever
have.
It’s a lot better than home. I’m having a great experience here.
I love this place.
It’s so clean, so comfortable, so relaxing, so peaceful.
It’s like a family.
I never want to leave.
If we had ordered up something [for our daughter’s college
experience] thirteen years ago when she first started school we
couldn’t have picked anything better.
This success was achieved not because hundreds of thousands of
dollars had been thrown at the problem, and not because a
blue-ribbon committee had drafted a Master Plan, and not because a
government agency had established a new grant program. It was
achieved because one faculty member took a clear and
well-established model—the residential colleges at
Harvard—and directly copied that model as completely as the local
conditions would allow, innovating and expanding as opportunities
arose, and drawing students and other faculty along.
As the internal structures and practices of Strong College
developed, however, I began to encounter many
objections within the university hierarchy that I had not
anticipated: it’s too hard, it’s too expensive, the faculty won’t
do it, the students won’t like it, and on and on. I knew that
these objections
were easily answered, and there was plenty of empirical
evidence that they just weren’t true. It became sadly clear,
however, that underlying most of these objections were really two
things: first, a “can’t-do” mentality that prefers comfortable
mediocrity to the possibility of accomplishment (see Chapter 13 in
Kors and Silverglate’s
The Shadow University
), and second, a
veiled but deep-seated class bigotry. Better to have our
students walking through broken glass on the way to the bathroom at
night, the unspoken reasoning went, than risk poisoning them with
snobby, elitist, Ivy-league ideas. (Ivy-league ideas, apparently,
like basic responsibility and consideration for others.) As Strong
College very quickly became the best-run building on campus, one
high-ranking student affairs officer
even went so far as to claim
that the reason we didn’t have as many behavioral problems as other
on-campus buildings was that we excluded black students. Needless
to say, this claim was utterly false, and the proportion of black
students in Strong College was the same as in the university at
large. His reasoning seemed to be that since the buildings
he had been in charge of for twenty years were out of
control, and since it obviously couldn’t be anything he
was doing wrong, it must be the black students. His accusation
exposed not only his incompetence, but his racism as well.
Those who love learning and love students can
transform the landscape of higher education and
create the kind of vibrant, intelligent, and socially rich campus
communities that everyone deserves. And they can do it anywhere by
sweeping out the broken, wasteful structures that have caused so
much damage, and by replacing them with small, faculty-led
residential colleges. We owe nothing less to the future. As one of
the cleverest students I have ever known once asked, “Why
are we here if we’re not magic?”
When this transformation has been accomplished, what will the
landscape of higher education be like? It will be a landscape of
small, stable homes that are academic and genuinely diverse, and
that have long memories.
2. Small and Stable Homes
For at least a generation, universities have been placing their
students in broken homes. Any environment that does not have
basic civil order—where people don’t feel safe and
can’t sleep, study, and relax in peace—cannot support anything
richer. The quality of life on large university campuses, and
especially the quality of life in dormitories, has declined so far
in the last generation that it is scandalous. There is even a
monographic study,
Violent Crimes and Other Forms of Victimization
in Residence Halls
, that outlines many of the details,
things that university publicity offices don’t want students and
parents to know about.
The collegiate landscape of the future will reverse this
decline. The colleges that make up this landscape will first of all
be small, each having about 400
members. They will be small because only within small
communities can all the students be known as individuals, which is
how they deserve to be known. In these small colleges the students
will be known by their interests, their quirks, their talents,
their fears, their hopes, their ambitions, their successes, and
their failures. And not only will the students be known as
individuals, but the faculty will be also, both by each
other and by the students, which will be to the students’
benefit, and sometimes to their amusement. The students will learn
that whenever Professor X expresses an opinion in conversation,
Professor Y will surely contradict it. They will learn that
Professor A dislikes early morning classes just as they do. They
will learn that Professor B is as proud of her dogs as she is of
her scholarship. They will learn that Professor C is something of a
parasite. They will learn that Professor Z grew up on a cattle
ranch and still loves the smell of manure. The hopes of your local
Chamber of Commerce notwithstanding, perhaps, each of the colleges
in this landscape of the future will be, in Cardinal Newman’s words, “an Alma Mater, knowing
her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.”
In
contrast to the big, centralized
universities of today, the collegiate landscape of the future
will provide many more opportunities for all
students and faculty members to become important contributors to
the community. There can be only one campus-wide student government
president in a big university, but there will be five, or ten, or
twenty student
government presidents in the collegiate systems of the future,
and just as many secretaries, social chairs, welcoming
committees, art shows, coffee bars, movie clubs, writing contests,
croquet
champions, computer helpers, literary societies,
boat races, jazz bands, library monitors, and gardening crews. All
students will have opportunities to develop their personal
abilities and to try out different roles within a supportive
community that knows them and that will appreciate their service.
As
Harvard’s President Lowell observed when he established the
Harvard collegiate system in the 1930s, it is more valuable to
become a man of mark in Ravenna than to belong to the mob of Rome.
The collegiate universities of the future, by replacing the
anonymous campus mob with small and stable homes, will raise up
generations of men and women of mark who will serve not only their
colleges, but also the greater society throughout their lives.
The smallness of these collegiate communities will make them
wellsprings of innovation and experiment. Just as
the states of the United States are laboratories of democracy, so
the colleges of each university will be laboratories of education.
Successful ideas developed in one will spread to others;
unsuccessful ideas tried out in one will be avoided by others, or
modified to be successful. The bureaucratic snarl that one
encounters when trying to accomplish anything in a large
organization will dissolve in the small, face-to-face environment
of each independent residential college.
The smallness of each college will promote
stability, because the greatest breeder of violence and
vandalism is anonymity. Many people decry the influence of peer
pressure on young people, but peer pressure, and the social
pressure exerted by the presence of faculty in an
environment, will be one of the most powerful forces for good in
the collegiate landscape of the future. The resident faculty in
each college, simply by being there, will dampen the effects of the
occasional troublemaker, and the responsible students, thus
emboldened, will do the rest. The first semester after Strong
College opened, its membership was made up of students who had
applied to join as well as a number of other students who had been
assigned to the building during this first year to fill the
remaining spaces until the college became established. A campus
baseball star who was in the latter group, who regularly came in
drunk late at night, who was abusive to staff members, and who
stole clothes from the laundry room, came to my office with a
friend one evening to ask about changing rooms. When I addressed
him by name, his friend turned with a start and said, “He knows who
you are.” He didn’t mean it in the happy sense of, “How nice, he
knows who you are.” He meant it in the worried sense of “Oh no, he
knows who you are”—we aren’t anonymous here, and that’s going to
make it harder for us to get away with things.
The smallness of each college will contribute greatly to its
social stability, but social stability requires more than just the
civil order that comes from a lack of anonymity. It should go
without saying that each college will have faculty in
residence throughout the year—this is fundamental to the
idea of a residential college. The heads
of the house will be there (a master and a dean, along with
their families), as will one or two other resident faculty—perhaps
a distinguished visitor at the university for a year, or perhaps a
retired professor emerita and her spouse. All these senior staff
appointments in each college will be for terms of five years at
least. How cohesive can any family be if its parents are switched
out every one or two years?
The social stability of each college will also grow out of a
consistent pattern of life to which all the
college’s members become accustomed: a weekly,
monthly, and annual rhythm that becomes familiar and
comfortable, and that allows everyone to know what is ahead. This
familiar rhythm will also allow the older students—the sophomores,
juniors, and seniors—to play an important mentoring role to the
freshmen, telling them about the regular events that will take
place during the year, and regaling them with nostalgic tales of
those same events in years past. New and one-time events will be
added as circumstances dictate of course, but the annual
framework will be very stable. Many parts of it will be
linked to the annual cycle of nature by reference to the migrations
of birds, the blooming of flowers,
and the turning of the dome of the sky. This localization of each
college will be an important antidote to the widespread McDonaldization of higher education that is beloved
by efficiency-minded campus business managers. (“Have you been to
our campus?” “I think so. Your campus is the one with the
Chik-fil-A and the Pizza Hut, right? Or was that some other
campus?”)
By virtue of being small and stable homes, the residential
colleges of the future will produce an intensity of
life that will allow us to return to the root of
e-ducare: to lead young people out into incandescent lives
of justice and service and compassion and intelligence. Education
for life does not come from watching sensitivity videos and
attending panel discussions; it does not come from spending a
couple of hours each week in a classroom; it comes from shared
experience and sustained conversation in close quarters for years
at a time. The student of the future, when she graduates, will say
of her college that it “has been like a
family.” And when she returns many years later as an elderly
alumna, she will remember her college years as a “small time, but, in that small, most greatly
lived.”
3. Academic and Genuinely Diverse
Homes
The collegiate landscape of the future will be an academic
landscape led by faculty, and it will be a place
where all college members integrate their classroom work with their
lives. The integration of formal learning with
life is not difficult to accomplish in a collegiate
environment, but to do it successfully does require a little
experience. The means through which this integration will take
place will include things like informal literary societies,
star-gazing
evenings, regular student-faculty lunches, concerts and plays,
word-of-the-day contests, museum excursions, poems-of-the-week,
nature
walks, and all manner of other things that good parents do with
their children. And just as the relationships between members of a
family should be mutually beneficial and not simply relationships
of provider and consumer, so also will the relationships between
all the members of a college—students and faculty alike—be mutually
beneficial. It is a fundamental mistake to see residential colleges
as student affairs “programs” that “we” set up for “them.” You will
know your colleges are successful when you hear faculty
making comments like these:
[Strong College] has been one of the richest experiences
of my professional life.
I came to UNCG as a new faculty member, and Strong College saved
me. It made me feel like I was part of the community.
One of the most fun things to me about Strong College, in
addition to the students, is meeting faculty from outside my
area.
[Strong College] has given me hope about what higher
education can do.
Each college in the landscape of the future will be a
cross-section of the university to which it
belongs, and as such will manifest the deep,
pied beauty that every human population manifests. Far more
important than the simple-minded diversity that university
administrators in the United States love to quantify in
black-white-asian-hispanic-handicapped tables, each college in the
landscape of the future will display the full range of
qualities—temperaments, interests, passions, weaknesses, ambitions,
talents, and experiences—that make each of its members unique
individuals.
By virtue of being cross-sections of their universities, the
residential colleges of the future will also overturn the
damaging trend toward thematic
residential buildings—the “arts dorm,” the “science dorm,” the
“health dorm,” the “sports dorm”—and all other forms of segregated
housing.
It is one of the paradoxes of our time that
universities require students to study a range of different
subjects so that they will become liberally educated, and then
actively encourage those same students to segregate themselves
according to their interests or backgrounds in their housing.
As cross-sectional communities, the residential colleges of the
future will also erase the most consistent form of segregation that
exists on every university campus: segregation by
age. In every college, undergraduates, graduate students,
faculty and their children, elderly alumni, parents, and
grandparents will all play an important role. I have heard housing
officers declare that students neither like nor want to have
children and older people around them in dormitories. The claim is
that students are only comfortable relating to their “peers.” To
discover the foolishness of this notion one need only watch what
happens when a small child is introduced into a room full of
undergraduates who haven’t seen their own younger brothers and
sisters in weeks.
The academic character of every residential college will not
only allow the members of those colleges to get to know each other
well, but it will also allow them to get to know the ways in which
they each see the world, and the ways in which others have seen the
world in ages past. It will be here that the true value of deep,
temperamental and intellectual diversity will be
realized, and that eyes will be opened and ears unstopped. In the
profusion of the college grounds a biology student will tell a poet
what he just learned about Darwin’s principles of natural
selection, first published in 1858, and the poet will suddenly
understand the Malthusian brilliance of Emily Dickinson writing in 1862:
How many Flowers fail in Wood –
Or perish from the Hill –
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful –
How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze –
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight –
It bear to Other Eyes –
At the dark of the moon a physics student will take out the
small college telescope and will show an accounting student the
rings of Saturn. A philosopher that night will come to understand
why the starry vault above was one of the only two things that
filled Immanuel Kant with awe, and a novelist watching the
moons of Jupiter will see how Galileo shattered the crystal
spheres. And perhaps in the college garden that night a troupe of
theater students will give an impromptu reading from Fontenelle’s
Conversations on the Plurality of
Worlds
.
In the college dining room the students and the
faculty alike will complain about the food, and a faculty member
may tell the students (or may fear to tell them, lest they Get
Ideas) about the “Butter Rebellion” at Harvard in 1766 when
students went on strike over rancid butter and the Governor
convened a hearing to decide how they should be punished, or about
the “Stomach War” at Yale in 1828 when students threatened to
strike over worms in the cabbage. (“Oh who, save with a quaking
heart e’er looked / On wormy cabbage though by Homer cooked.”) Thus
inspired, the students might even compose their own culinary
verses, as some of mine once did around the dinner table with me
when they found two large feathers still attached to their nightly
serving of fried chicken:
A Feast of the
Classics
Feathers—awesome!
And cake.
Sitting on top of my poetry.
Feathers—two!
Sticking out of my chicken.
No cake.
No.
FEATHERS!!!
At tea in the common room the students (and some of the faculty)
will learn the art of conversation, and how to
meet new people and make them feel welcome. A few of them will
learn manners for the first time. Through the rich opportunities
presented by college life they will learn the intangible rewards of
service to others.
They will learn how to be teachers of new students,
and how to recover from their mistakes. Into the commonplace
books in each room their lives and fears and joys and
resentments will flow, revealing in some the same compulsion that
has driven diarists in every age. In college
elections, which will become as hotly contested as any
national race, they will learn the art of politics and the
potential for power both to corrupt and to do good.
And in the collegiate landscape of the future, much as we may
hope they will not, some of the students will learn about
suffering, and they will learn that Aristotle may have been right
when he said that the study of tragedy should be at the center of
liberal education. Here it will be most important
that the colleges be small and stable and strong so that those in
pain will not be alone, and that they will find
friends not only in the present but also in the past. The
Asian student whose father is losing his fight with cancer will not
be alone when he makes friends with an alcoholic Welshman who begged his own father to
rage
against the dying of the light
. The brilliant writer who
discovers her mental illness will not be alone when she makes
friends with Lord Byron as he sails
in the wind’s eye. The frightened freshman, never away from
home before, will not be alone when he makes friends with a
Greek soldier who died two and a half thousand
years ago:
How many times,
How many times,
On the gray sea,
The sea combed
By the wind
Like a wilderness
Of woman’s hair,
Have we longed,
Lost in nostalgia,
For the sweetness
Of homecoming.
The business student from an immigrant family who is struggling
to pay her bills and fears she may have to drop out of school will
discover she is not alone when she makes friends
with Langston Hughes writing from Harlem in the voice of
his mother:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, don’t turn back,
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you find it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
And the present-day friends of all of these, torn apart because
they are afraid to help and don’t know what to do, will discover
that they also are not alone when they see the raw
fear of e.e. cummings’ Good Samaritan who “staggered
banged with terror through / a million billion trillion
stars.”
Every human community experiences joys and sorrows. As diverse
academic communities, the residential colleges of the future will
not only be able to offer the personal support
that all their members deserve, but will also be able to bring
their members into contact with the joys, sorrows, and support
offered by the men and women of the past.
4. Homes That Will Remember
The
problems facing higher education today arose in the post-WWII era,
and the 1960s in particular, eras that were contemptuous of
history. But history—the past—is desperately needed by young
people. They must feel that they are part of something
larger than themselves, a tradition that has come before
them, and that will go on after them, and to which they can make
important contributions. And to those who reflexively assert that
traditions are stifling and prejudiced, I reply that no one is more
in need of strong traditions in their education than the radicals
and subversives of the future, because they more than anyone need
something challenging to push against. They need
“teachers
of athletes” who will show them respect by arguing with them
and making them strong, not spineless educationists who will tell
them “whatever you want to believe is fine”—a disrespectful and
self-serving excuse for a lack of real engagement. As a future
world leader of my acquaintance once asked, “Why not live in place
where I can have professors as friends? Why not live in a place
with a network of support, advice, love, respect, melodrama, and
laughter? Why not live in a place where you feel like a part of
something bigger, something deeper, something more?” The collegiate
landscape of the future will be a landscape that is filled with
history and memory, where every student is part of something
bigger, something deeper, something more.
The memory of each college will be embodied in a rich array of
live
traditions, noted above as contributors to social stability.
The social stability that these traditions produce will not merely
be a stability of the moment, however: it will be a stability
through generations. Some of the traditions of each college will be
serious, some silly, some local, and some global. Colleges in
temperate climates will have ceremonies honoring the opening of the
first rose of the year on the college grounds, or the arrival of
the first swallow in the spring. One of the most famous collegiate
traditions in the world is the sunrise hymn sung each year on the
first of May at Magdalen College, Oxford, beautifully dramatised in the
film
Shadowlands
. The celebration of
national and international anniversaries, though not specific to
any particular college, will also play an important role in placing
college members into the context of the greater society to which
they belong. These public acts of memory—whether
of events in the
near or the distant past—are vital
to the long-term health of any community. And clever members will
track down more exotic things to celebrate perhaps, like the
ancient Roman holiday of Lupercalia, or the birthdays of little-remembered
poets.
The history and traditions of each college will be
carefully preserved in a wide range of material
objects, as well as in public events. Even before each new college
is opened, the college’s archives will have been established—far
less importantly for the preservation of administrative paperwork
than for the preservation of the accomplishments of college
members. Newsletters will document
the life of each college, and will be carefully preserved. From
each annual art
show the winning piece will be selected for permanent display
in the college, so that students in future generations may wonder
at it. The souvenir artwork designed for each new entering class
will be signed and
framed and likewise displayed, and in every such case a few
extra dollars will be spent to make sure that the framing is done
with museum-quality materials. Members of each departing class will
write to those
who will take their places, and who they may never meet. Every
public room will have its own commonplace
book to record the late-night thoughts of its visitors, and
these will likewise become permanent, carefully-preserved records
of the college’s life. College members will build furniture, carve
stones, embroider blankets, write poems, and paint pictures to pass
on to their posterity.
The grounds of each college will be places of
living memory. Each freshman class will plant flowers in their own
honor, and watch them grow as they themselves grow. Seeds and
cuttings from the college gardens will be made available to alumni
around the world so they may keep a living part of their college
with them. Commemorative stones will mark major events. The local
community will be invited annually by the students to tour the
college grounds at the height of the blooming season. The grounds
will be the site of alumni weddings, and the fragrance of the trees
that the students planted under their own windows will remain with
them all their lives. And in cases where things in the college must
be replaced or removed, fragments of the old will be incorporated
into the new: old stones to new walls, old designs
to new paintings, old plants to new gardens.
The members of every college will someday grow old and die. But
they will know that their memory will survive,
built into the fabric of the collegiate life that they themselves
wove, and the promise of Sappho will come true for them all:
You may forget
but
Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us.