[1602] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: [Mit-talk] NYTimes.com: The New College Mixer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sun Sep 4 01:31:15 2005
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 01:30:52 -0400
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
To: Jimmy Wu <jimmbswu@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200509040524.j845O2fF016773@fort-point-station.mit.edu>
cc: mit-talk@mit.edu
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
Jimmy Wu <jimmbswu@alum.mit.edu> wrote on Sun, 4 Sep 2005 at 01:24:02
-0400 in <200509040524.j845O2fF016773@fort-point-station.mit.edu>:
> This page was sent to you by: jimmbswu@alum.mit.edu.
>
> As usual, the main stream media is a couple of years behind in their
> trend reporting. Jimmy
>
> HOME & GARDEN | September 1, 2005
> The New College Mixer
> By BRADFORD McKEE
> Today's dorms are changing, along with other aspects of student
> life, as college officials try to induce a more convivial mood on
> campus.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/garden/01dorm.html?ex=1126497600&
> en=3828f222c7769fa0&ei=5070&emc=eta1
I think more people will read it if the full text is sent to the list
(and so appended).
Also, in case anyone missed it, Rehnquist died Saturday evening
sometime before 11pm. Big changes in store.
--jhawk
The New York Times Home & Garden
New York Times
The New College Mixer
By BRADFORD McKEE
Published: September 1, 2005
Swarthmore, Pa.
WHETHER they know it or not, the 75 students moving this week into Alice Paul
Hall, the sleek new dormitory alongside Parrish Lawn here at Swarthmore
College, are being manipulated at nearly every turn into developing a social
life.
At the very least, it will be hard for anyone living in the four-story building
to avoid meeting his or her neighbors. Stuart Hain, Swarthmore's head of
facilities, said college officials wanted the elevator placed far from the main
entrance to persuade students to take the stairs, where they are more likely to
talk to one another.
The stairs rise from a bright living room lounge just inside the entrance,
where people-watching is at a premium. Overlooking the lounge in the public
heart of the building is the laundry room. Mr. Hain said it was brought up from
the basement deliberately to serve as a social hub. Laundry may not be sexy, he
said, but it does draw a crowd.
Not surprisingly, Alice Paul Hall has become the hot dorm on campus. Brendan
Grady, 19, a sophomore from San Jose, Calif., pointed out the benefit of the
building's several lounges. "The front lounge, especially, is a huge space,"
Mr. Grady said. "So I can see us throwing a couple of parties in there."
Mr. Hain said the idea was to try to enliven the hall "so there was more coming
and going in the middle of the building."
It does not matter, in fact, whether students are coming or going, so long as
they are not disappearing into their rooms under the hypnotic spell of the
Internet and television, or succumbing to mounting pressure to map their
careers before they even finish their education. If campus dorms have
traditionally been built as efficient ways to stack students safely on
campuses, today's dorms are changing, along with other aspects of student life,
as college officials try to induce a more convivial mood on campus.
Administrators nowadays worry that the tempting gadgets students keep in their
dorm rooms and in their pockets are threatening to clear the commons and kill
the civic way of life on campus. College leaders are fighting student
alienation by trying to recapture an ideal of higher education, wherein
academic and social life are inseparable.
They are also trying to answer to leagues of ever more exacting parents, who
want their children to become situated, stay busy and get out in four years.
And not least, the colleges, which spent about $12 billion on construction in
2004, according to a survey conducted by American School and University
magazine, recognize that every student paying for room and board ($10,000 this
year at Swarthmore) helps the institution's income.
Students and administrators have always disagreed on many things, however, and
the finer points of living on campus are no exception. "The administrators want
community," said William Rawn, an architect whose firm in Boston designed Alice
Paul Hall, with its outer walls clad in quartzite cut from a celebrated Swiss
quarry, then shipped to the port of Chester, Pa. "And the students want
privacy."
But for the most part, the students - freshmen and sophomores especially - will
not find privacy in the new generation of campus dormitories. Many recent
designs seem achingly familiar: small rooms assigned to two people, ranged
along a corridor. But there are subtle devices meant to encourage students to
mix. A new residence hall opening this week for 166 freshmen at Wesleyan
University, in Middletown, Conn., has a laundry room next to a lounge with a
plasma TV and a kitchen; throughout the building are nook seats and halls with
a lot of natural light.
Corridors are made for mingling. In a residence hall opened last year at the
College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio, the corridor widths flare at the ends to
make them more spatially interesting, and study lounges inside bay windows look
out onto an intimate courtyard.
Even bathrooms are being designed for sociability, said Laurence Booth, a
Chicago architect whose firm, Booth Hansen, is designing a new dorm at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mr. Booth said his firm considered providing
access from each of four double rooms on a hall directly into the shared
bathroom, but university officials said no. Now, "in order to get to the
bathroom you have to go through the hall," Mr. Booth said. "They wanted that
social interaction."
Colleges have learned in recent years that they can play social matchmaker by
creating specialized floors within dorms, if not entire buildings: floors for
healthy living, quiet floors, language floors and honors floors, with which
larger colleges in particular are attempting to create a sense of campus
community.
Mr. Rawn, who has designed a number of dormitory projects, said college
officials today seemed less concerned about antisocial behavior, like hurling
beer bottles out of windows, than about asocial behavior - that is, "not even
getting near the beer."
Students today are more professionally driven than those of a generation or two
ago, in part because they have big education bills to pay, said Cathy Small, an
anthropology professor at Northern Arizona University, whose book, "My Freshman
Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student," is being published this
month by Cornell University Press under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan. Students,
Dr. Small said, are rarely alone spacing out or idly surfing the Internet.
"They're not only working, but the professional clubs and volunteer work are
being very much pushed," Dr. Small said. Some students, she added, had trouble
fitting in time for meals. "I found them very scheduled," she said.
Yet college students spend an increasing amount of time, about 13 hours a week,
at computers, said Kevin Kruger, the associate executive director of the
National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, in Washington, and a
former dean of students at the University of Maryland.
"The campus experience is becoming more dissociative," Mr. Kruger said. The
time students spend using computers amounts to that of a part-time job, "and
most of it is spent on gaming and instant messaging and online dating and so
forth."
Some students, though, say the administrators' worries are overblown.
"Computers have entered our lives and are part of what we do," said Joella
Fink, a 20-year-old Swarthmore junior from Plantation, Fla. Some students phone
their friends for dinner and others send instant messages, she said, but the
fact is, they have dinner face to face.
Serena Le, 19, a junior and a resident assistant, who is returning to
Swarthmore from Albany, Calif., said that as much as instant messaging and the
like appear to depersonalize campus life, they also facilitate it. "Now
freshmen are meeting each other before they arrive on campus," she said, rather
than showing up as strangers.
As always, students bring familiar belongings to help ease the shock of life
away from home, said Kumara Govardhan, 21, of Bethel, Conn. Mr. Govardhan has
been a resident assistant at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.,
for the past two years.
"I look at what the new students are bringing with them, a lot of new
technologies and DVD players," he said. "They love their comfort zone. It
reminds them of the things they did at home."
A pair of residence halls at Hobart and William Smith Colleges that opened in
January have exercise rooms, a game area and a Starbucks cafe. Each hall also
has only one entrance, noted Debra DeMeis, the dean of William Smith College.
"They can exit other ways for safety, but everyone has to use a common stairway
to get in," Dr. DeMeis said, "which leads to that everyday talking to and
bumping into people who live in your house."
Peter Newman, the architect whose New Haven firm, Herbert S. Newman and
Partners, designed the Hobart buildings, said college officials are reacting to
research that shows if students become socially comfortable on campus, then the
broader imperatives of going to college take hold earlier. That obviously
benefits students, but also helps their parents relax.
"Once the tuition payments started rivaling parents' mortgage payments,
everyone became a much sharper consumer," Mr. Newman said.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
_______________________________________________
MIT-talk mailing list
MIT-talk@mit.edu
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/mit-talk
