Panel proposes major
changes in
undergrad housing
BY MARISA CIGARROA
A task force report on
undergraduate housing calls for fundamental changes to
the system across the board, from housing configurations
and assignments to staffing and academic support
programs.
Provost Condoleezza Rice
discussed the proposed changes at the Faculty Senate on
Thursday, Nov. 13. The report was released earlier that
day by Ramón Saldívar, vice provost for undergraduate
education, who chaired the Task Force on Residential
Programs and Student Housing for Undergraduates.
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At the senate meeting,
Rice also addressed faculty concerns regarding parking
and the graduate student housing crunch. Parking will
inevitably will have to move farther away from campus
buildings, she said.
"We're going to have
to get accustomed to systems that really do have cars out
in more remote locations and then bring people in by
people-movers or by bicycle or foot into the center of
campus," said the provost, who added that members of
the campus community should also refrain from moving
their cars to attend meetings.
Responding to senate
discussion on the shortage of graduate student housing on
campus, Rice said a group of administrators has been
meeting since the summer to come up with short-term and
long-term solutions to the problem.
Task force
recommendations
Most of the task force's
recommendations focus on ways to forge stronger links
between the academic curriculum and residential life,
Saldívar said.
"We say that we are a
residential university and we also say that we have a
residential education program," he said. "So
the intent here is to really make residential life live
up to what we would like it to be."
Proposed revisions
include:
- Creating a
freshman/sophomore residential cluster.
- Concentrating
first-year students in residences with a
"critical mass" of freshmen.
- Adding more
all-freshman houses to meet student demand.
- Providing incentives
and support structures to get more faculty to
become resident fellows.
- Differentiating
residential programming to meet the special needs
of underclass and upperclass students.
- Simplifying the
housing assignment process and the draw to make
them more equitable.
The 16-member task force
of faculty, staff, students and one member of the Board
of Trustees held weekly meetings from December through
June; conducted a student survey; sponsored several town
hall meetings with students in the residences; and
reviewed comparative information on housing and
residential programs at other universities.
"The task force found
that Stanford's undergraduate residential programs are
not by any means in crisis," Rice told the members
of the senate. "But it is a system that is more than
25 years old and it needs to be modified to respond to
the significant curricular and other academic initiatives
that have reshaped the undergraduate education at
Stanford over the last several years."
Implementation
Rice charged Saldívar and
James Montoya, vice provost of student affairs, with
evaluating, prioritizing and implementing the proposals.
They will be supported by a team composed of faculty,
students and staff from residential education, the
housing office and undergraduate advising. Academic
oversight will be provided by the Committee on
Undergraduate Studies, through its standing subcommittee
on residential education and advising.
"I want to stress
that these recommendations are really, we think, quite
exciting and potentially quite fundamental," Rice
said, "but there's still a great deal of
consultation and discussion that needs to go on in the
university community about them before any of them would
be actually implemented."
Housing
configuration
Following the lead of
Stanford Introductory Studies, which focuses on the first
two years of undergraduate study, the task force has
recommended a pilot program to test the feasibility of
creating a college learning community for freshman and
sophomores.
"The point is to
mimic in the houses what we have done in the academic
program," Saldívar said. "We have recommended
the creation of two-class housing because those first two
years offer a foundation for students that they can then
use as a stepping-stone to the third and fourth
years."
According to the task
force report, the proposed freshman/sophomore
"learning community" would be housed in a
building or cluster of residences, such as those
available in Sterling Quadrangle of Governor's Corner or
in Lagunita Hall. The goal of this pilot program is to
integrate learning in the classroom and in the dorm and
to provide first- and second-year students with guidance
to help them make optimal use of the pre-major years. The
program could begin as early as next fall, Saldívar
said.
Formalized links would
exist with particular freshman and sophomore seminars and
with the new Introduction to the Humanities course
through weekly supplemental study group discussions.
Other ideas include having residence-based, 1-unit
mini-courses offered by faculty, service-learning courses
offered in conjunction with the Haas Center for Public
Service and freshman orientation courses offered by
student affairs staff throughout the year.
This proposal is not
without controversy, Saldívar said.
"Some students have
felt that to keep sophomores with freshman in effect
prolongs their adolescence of the year of initiation that
freshman year represents and that the second year really
should be a movement out into the upper class
ranks," he said.
Another concern voiced by
some students is the potential effect it could have on
fraternities, sororities and the Row houses. "The
task force understood that we are working with a
system," Saldívar said. "When you tinker with
one part of it, it can have effects all along the system.
That's why we proposed a pilot program."
Other suggested revisions
include adding more all-freshman housing to meet student
demand, instituting an ongoing review of academic, ethnic
and focus theme houses, and reconfiguring dorms as
necessary to create more flexible study and seminar
space.
Residential
staffing
Several of the recommended
changes to residential staffing are intended to attract
more senior faculty to become Resident Fellows (RFs).
According to report, of
the 33 RF positions currently available, only 12 are held
by senior faculty; of the 31 residences housing freshman
students in either all-freshman or four-class
configurations, there are only five RF's who are senior
faculty; and of the nine all-freshman houses, only two
are currently staffed by RFs who are senior faculty.
The task force found that
the low rate of faculty participation in the RF program
at Stanford differs greatly from the situation of faculty
in equivalent positions at other residential universities
such as Harvard and Yale.
House "Masters"
in these schools hold positions of great respect that are
eagerly sought by senior faculty members, the report
states. They live in spacious, "even
sumptuous," living quarters and usually receive
summer salaries, varying degrees of course relief or
sabbatical credit, and substantial funds to support
academic and intellectual programs in the residences.
Currently, RFs at Stanford
receive the indirect benefit of housing and dining
privileges in the dorms to compensate for their service.
"In sum," the report concludes, "it is
probably not an exaggeration to suggest that in contrast
to the situations at other universities there are both
direct and indirect disincentives for faculty to
serve as Resident Fellows at Stanford."
To help remedy this
situation, the task force has recommended that RF living
quarters be reviewed and upgraded as necessary; that RFs
be compensated for their work in the dorms with summer
salary support and other incentives, such as sabbatical
accrual credits and programmatic funds; and that a
differentiated compensation structure be established to
take into account the added responsibilities of being an
RF in an all-freshman or freshman/sophomore residence.
Alterations to residential
staffing are recommended to free RFs to concentrate on
the scholarly aspects of residential education. The
addition of graduate students or postdoctoral fellows as
Resident Tutors, for example, could help relieve some of
the crisis management that RFs currently handle, the
report states.
Residential
programming and advising
Another set of
recommendations focuses on differentiating residential
programming to meet the needs of freshman, sophomores,
juniors and seniors.
One suggestion is
developing a Residential Honors Program that would offer
academic support in the residences to students engaged in
honors research work.
On the advising front,
assigning academic advising related to formal degree
requirements to non-faculty academic advisers or
professional staff is suggested so that faculty advisers
can expand their role as mentors. SR
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