On Feb. 26, Dartmouth students will gather in Baker-Berry Library at 8 p.m. to attend Founders’ Day, where they will get sorted into their respective housing communities. The library will be separated into sections for each house community and students will break off into receptions to meet the other members of their new communities.
At a house council meeting on Monday, the house professors for the communities as well as members of the administration discussed the upcoming fall implementation of the house system. Thayer School of Engineering professor Jane Hill will be the house professor of Allen House, math professor Sergi Elizalde will be with East Wheelock House, biology professor Ryan Calsbeek will be with North Park House, math professor Craig Sutton will be with School House, sociology professor Kathryn Lively will be with South House, physics and astronomy professor Ryan Hickox will be with West House and Asian and Middle Eastern studies professor Dennis Washburn will lead the living learning communities.
Student working groups were formed this term to help set up a basic platform for how the housing communities will function. Groups have themes such as house identity, programming and social media. In the fall, there was also a working group on student governance to better understand how the governance in the houses will work, Hickox said.
Hickox added that working groups aim to show that the responsibilities of the housing communities, including programming and budget, will largely fall to the students rather than being imposed in a top-down fashion.
Elizalde and Sutton are faculty members of the student working group on programming, facilitated by associate director of residential education Jeff DeWitt.
These groups generate ideas for programming and look at campus groups to determine “what works and what doesn’t” and what motivates students to participate in events, Elizalde said.
No specific events are planned for any of the houses yet, Sutton said, but all students will have the chance to plan for their communities.
House professors will be living in close proximity to their respective house communities. Hill said that possible events could include weekly teas and barbecues.
Sutton said that the two new social spaces being constructed on campus and the residences for the house professors will satisfy student demand for more programming space.
Hickox said that houses will have more than just professors as part of the community.
“There won’t just be us as house professors, but we’ll have a whole community of faculty and staff associated with each of the houses too,” Hickox said. “We’ll take part in things with students.”
Hickox said that one of the things students like about Dartmouth is the opportunity to get to know faculty well.
“We do a great job with that in the classroom right now, but this will allow a much more expansive, organic relationship with faculty to happen outside the classroom too,” he said.
In addition to faculty and staff, up to four graduate students will be living in each housing community as resident fellows.
Dean of the College Rebecca Biron said that the resident fellows will also be participating in academic and social events with house community members. She said they will be bringing their research areas into the house to share with undergraduates.
Biron said that none of the programming or events hosted by the house communities are obligatory.
“They’re for personal growth, enjoyment [and] engaging with students you may not meet in the classroom because you major in different things and you have different pathways through campus, but you all gain ownership over a shared corner of the campus,” she said.
Students will still be able to live in a Greek house, affinity house or a living learning community, Biron said.
Lively said that students who choose to live in these places will still be members of one of the six houses and will still get invited to events and to participate in programming.
As a member of the working group for social media, Lively said that students in the group are trying to come up with ideas for how to maintain connections with house communities even when abroad.
Washburn said that for students who are on a leave term or studying abroad, they will still be able to connect to their communities through social media and they will have much more stability in housing.
In the fall, students were allowed to select one to five friends to be in the same housing community as themselves.
These requests will be honored said Mike Wooten, senior assistant dean of residential life and director of residential education. He said that randomized room draws prioritized by class year will still occur, but simply within each particular house community. He also said that there will be an equal distribution of class years within each house community.
First-year students will be in the same house as those who live near their first-year dorms.
Hickox said that people will be less associated with particular dorm buildings, but more with the entire cluster of buildings that make up a house community.
This new housing community system has been compared to similar systems at peer institutions, such as Yale University, which has a residential college system.
Washburn said that Dartmouth’s system will be much more flexible than other institutions in the way social life will evolve in the first few years of the system’s implementation.
“Dartmouth is going to evolve its own system and it will fit the needs of the Dartmouth students,” he said. “That’s the crucial thing, because a lot of this is going to be initiated by the students.”
Hickox said that he hopes the engagement of other members of the community, including faculty, staff, alumni and graduate students, will set the College’s house communities apart from those in other institutions in a positive way.
Biron said there have been calls for Dartmouth to create a house community system for over 30 years.
“A lot of students in an earlier period remember staying in the same dorm for four years,” she said. “That doesn’t happen at all anymore and some alums remember that very fondly as a strong contributing factor to the value of their liberal arts education here.”
Wooten said it would be wasteful not to integrate students’ four-year residential experience with the College’s dedication to the project of teaching and learning.
Lively echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the idea of learning beyond an academic setting.
“Learning is about learning how to do the things you’re passionate about,” Lively said. “Learning cuts across every aspect of life — this is not just the kind of learning you get in a classroom.”
Washburn said that the new system will help address the problem of students who have trouble finding a community on campus with the current residential system.
Hill said that students should try and maintain an open mind about what is possible with this new system.
Lively noted that there will be additional house-specific working groups.
“The people who feel like they’re being pinched on institutional pivot, it’s their opportunity to try and help build the bridge between what they know and what’s going to happen,” she said.
Sonia is a junior from Ottawa, Canada. (That is the mysterious Canadian capital that no one seems to ever have heard of.) She is a double major in Economics and Government, with a minor in French. She decided to join The D’s news team in her freshman fall because of her love of writing, talking to people, getting the most up-to-date news on campus, and having a large community of fellow students to share these interests with.
