Over the years of 2003 to 2005, students in my course, “Introduction to Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology,” carried out participant-observation studies of dormitories at the College. Their reports documented pervasive discontinuity in student life, much like that often found in backpackers’ hostels. What their research found absent are those social characteristics typifying successful multi-functional, face-to-face residential communities — continuity, commons, caring and sharing. In light of the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” plan for residential life, here are suggestions for significant changes to Dartmouth dormitory living, derived in part from the students’ research.
The discontinuity of co-residency, created by the year-round calendar and the D-Plan, is the biggest obstacle to residential stability. To change dorms from hostels to congregate communities, to give each dorm an identity and to create the experience of it as a home, their resident populations, spaces and activities should be a relatively stable four-year experience for each student.
My students found that only a small part of dormitory living includes what might be called a “commons” — the collectively managed physical and social resources required for reproducing a community over time. Design and maintenance of, as well as participation in a “residential commons,” should be a larger and more explicit aspect of dormitory life by including guests-in-residence, seminars, colloquia, debates, discussion of films, book groups, intramural sports, talent shows, service work, food drives, field trips and shared use and maintenance of physical facilities within the communities.
A most important kind of sharing and exchange, especially in a collegiate atmosphere, is rewarding conversation, which would be stimulated and informed by dorm-specific and inter-dormitory “co-curricular activities” such as those suggested above. For better or worse, the College’s Greek organizations have a strongly developed sense that the house and its activities comprise a commons. This commons now includes many very unfortunate elements, to be sure. As these Greek organizations prove, however, commitment to a commons has demonstrated power to build and maintain bonds of community.
Preparing and eating meals together creates community. Mass centralized dining, such as in the Class of 1953 Commons, is a major deterrent to residentially-based food preparation and eating. Nothing facilitates conversation, getting to know one another, activity planning, intellectual and emotional exchange and building ties of friendship as does the daily breaking of bread together among co-residents.
Much of student social life at the College is, like dining, centrally planned and provided to the campus as a whole. We have “centers” for most student activities, which — with the exception of sleeping — are financially, architecturally and programmatically tethered to “centers” for the arts, worship, classes, sports, community service and the like. Many activities and facilities now located in and sponsored by “centers” could and should be located and undertaken in some form in and among neighboring dormitories.
The College’s current residential culture will not change predictably by deploying a few, selected “silver-bullet” interventions. Planned culture change, with plausibly predictable outcomes, requires systemic thinking. If the College wishes to change the Greek system, for example, the Greek system will have to be but one element in a system-wide plan. Note that one of Dartmouth’s peers, Yale University, is currently building two new residential colleges, each of which incorporates the features and rationale described above — and all of which have also been key parts of the older colleges there. Dormitories at the College have changed over past decades to their detriment by abdicating their social prominence — mainly under the pressure of year-round-operation — to the Greek houses, which have become by default the preeminent centers of students’ residential lives. Fundamental change in the entire social ecology of dormitory living is a necessary condition for a successful plan to improve and move the College’s residential life forward.
Hoyt Alverson is a professor emeritus of anthropology.
