GUEST COLUMN: The collegiate system's goal: Open up opportunities for students

and Robert Lucid The article "College house plan to begin next fall" (DP 9/19/95) contains so many factual and interpretative inaccuracies that we feel it is important to set the record straight about at least one part of the article's concern: The collegiate planning work that is being undertaken this year. In its report of last spring, the Provost's Council on Undergraduate Education recommended the development of a series of pilots to test the feasibility of moving toward a full-fledged collegiate system. The four pilots include: The development of a Civic College House, which contrary to what was reported in the above article, is not to be located in or to subsume the Castle. This effort, which began to be conceptualized by a faculty/student committee last year and is being developed by another such group under the chairmanship of Professor Peter Conn this year, envisions a residentially-based academic center which offers courses as well as a residential framework for students of all disciplines interested in service learning. The development of a residentially based program for upperclass students who are interested in research in any discipline. The issues to be considered in the development of this pilot involve identifying the services, facilities and structures that are needed to support students who undertake research. What kind of program can best facilitate their efforts? The development of a non-residential collegiate hub for students who live off-campus. This is not a college house or any sort of residential program, but is rather to be considered a service and activity center. The pilot will test what kinds of services can effectively support an off-campus population so that they do not feel distant from the university. The development of an electronic community which has a residential core that reaches out to connect with students who are no longer residents. Such a community already exists within the Science and Technology Wing of Kings Court/English House. The pilot planning group, to be chaired by Kings Court/English House Senior Faculty Resident Professor Jorge Santiago-Aviles, will study how this electronic community, based in residence, can cultivate a relationship with an off-campus, non-residential population whose members can make use of the on-campus resources. Bridging campus and non-campus communities is the essential effort undertaken here. These pilots are intended to help us answer an important set of questions about what parts of a collegiate system can work effectively. Such a system is larger than the current residential college house system, which would become part of it. Thus the term "collegiate system" is far broader than "college house" and specifically rejects the idea of making people live on campus in order to draw upon the resources located there. Last spring, PCUE recognized that we had in place successful college house and first year house programs which are residentially based. It also recognized that we have many students who choose not to live in university-owned residences. Of the four pilots to be tested, only two are residentially based, and they grow out of particular faculty-student interests which are academic but not discipline-based. It would therefore be wrong to conclude, as the editorial "True Intellectualism" asserts (DP 9/20/95), that such a system would force students by discipline into narrow intellectual paths. To the contrary, these efforts have as their goal opening up opportunities for student choice, leadership, governance, active learning and intellectual exploration -- precisely the kinds of experiences that so many students interviewed told us last spring that they wanted. Faculty and student planners hope finally, after more of the trial and error that we have already gone through on earlier projects, to discover a system of collegiate opportunity in which the concept of the college house itself represents only one kind of affiliation among a significant range of others. But people trying to imagine how to design for the future are going to begin by having reference to what has already been imagined in the present, and the college house system, the living-learning programs, and the first-year house communities represent concrete accomplishments which are an earnest of our ability to do new things. With good luck, our new things in the future will go far beyond the limits of what has been done so far. Indeed, if they are to work they must do so.

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