EDITORIAL: The best-laid plans?

Administrator can learnAdministrator can learnfrom the discontinuation of Administrator can learnfrom the discontinuation of two 'virtual college' pilotAdministrator can learnfrom the discontinuation of two 'virtual college' pilotprograms.Administrator can learnfrom the discontinuation of two 'virtual college' pilotprograms.____________________________ The students who had planned to live in CAUSE have now formed EFFECT, a scaled-down but similar project. We applaud their initiative; they will still be able to live together and share ideas and discoveries next year, but not in their originally assigned Quadrangle location, and not with the budgetary support the University promised last fall. There is a valuable lesson to be learned from this experience: If residential colleges are to succeed as an integral part of undergraduate life here, it's time to apply the brakes to the planning process. We've said this before, but we'll say it again now that the only surviving pilots are the non-residential Writers House and the Science and Technology program, an extension of an already-flourishing, multi-facility program. The architects of whatever variation on a college house system is instituted at the University need to stop worrying about administration-mandated timetables, and step back to consider instead what students want, need and could benefit from in a revamped residential system. The next time planning committees are assembled, their members need to be ordinary students, who can tell faculty members and administrators what would make them want to live in a non-themed college house like the ones at Yale University -- or what would make them happy if they were required to live there. Then, administrators need to listen to what they are told, for even the best-laid plans will not take root if student support is lacking. Clearly, a college house system cannot be installed here in the fall of 1997 if two of four small-scale, interest-specific pilots can't get off the ground for a trial run next fall. But that doesn't mean it's time to give up on the idea.