Residential model near completion

The preliminary model of the University's residential college system will be completed by this April, according to English Professor and Collegiate Planning Board Chairperson Robert Lucid. Lucid said the plan, which is a part of the administration's 21st Century Project on Undergraduate Education, will be a theoretical design of a college combining residential living with academics. University President Judith Rodin said in the fall of 1994 that the 21st Century Project should be implemented by 1997. But according to Lucid, the planning board has yet to determine when the college system will first be put in place. While four pilot programs will begin next fall and may become components of the residential colleges, Lucid said this spring's plan for the college system will move forward only if it garners the support it needs from the administration and students. "We'd like to track it onto a time-line as quickly as the community agrees with it," he said. Lucid said there will eventually be 12 residential colleges in the system, but they will not all begin to operate at the same time. "It wouldn't just emerge with all flags flying," he said. "It would be an entity that comes about in stages." According to Linda Koons, executive assistant to Provost Stanley Chodorow, the draft model of the proposed college will not describe its physical attributes. Lucid said the plan will instead design a way to deliver student services to the community of a residential college. "[The planning board is] in the process now of imagining in as much imaginative detail as possible what one of these collegiate units would look and feel like," Undergraduate English Chairperson and board member Al Filreis said. "The key is delivering some student services through the collegiate unit -- both for students in residence and those not in residence through their affiliation with one of the colleges." According to Lucid, plans for the maintenance and physical structure of the college system will be secondary to this initial plan. But he does predict that new buildings will eventually be needed in order to construct the college system. "It would be hard to imagine some new college system without a new building," he said. "You're going to have a need for more structures." But Koons said there has not been any discussion about constructing new buildings for the colleges. "We have talked about using our current buildings differently," she said. "The plan is to place the colleges within our current facilities. "This will necessitate renovation," Koons added. "But many of our residential facilities need to be renovated whether we have colleges or not." Filreis said the cost of maintenance and renovation for the college system will not be any greater than the cost of maintaining the individual buildings anyway. "We don't anticipate that the new program of collegiate units will do anything that a forward-looking Penn wouldn't do with these important buildings anyway," he said. "The conversion is more programmatic and intellectual than financial." He added that the board "does not at this point, except rarely, discuss cost."