My first thought on reading this was, "why does the building of a community have to be connected to the physical residence halls? Can't people form communities based on people they meet in class, or people they meet in various extracurricular activities? Why should the residence-life people be anything other than (hopefully competent) hotel managers?"

OTOH, I also remembered a passage from G K Chesterton:

"The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell"

I think our students live in a larger world whose attractions just can't be matched by any ResLife program--unless it happens to be led by truly exceptional people, or where it is mandatory. There are exceptions--schools as different as Virginia Military Institute and Deep Springs College--that admirably serve students wishing to self-select into a shared communal-pedagogical life. But as for the vast majority of programs driven by administrative rather than student desires, I say get rid of 'em.

I admire the brilliance of the Chesterton quote, just as I admire the brilliance of any truly satanic utterance. Oh for the good old days--I know of no one writing today who can lie as smoothly and as brilliantly as Chesterton. It's so easy to agree with this: "The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment" that one hardly notices the falsity of this: "like that which exists in hell." How subtle a move--to put "hell" precisely where one ought to have put "the Church," or even "heaven"!
Many roads lead to hell. In fact all but one, if we can trust our scriptures. It's the gateway to heaven that is strait. Hell is (or, in its more literal constructions, will be) populated by everyone from Karl Marx to Joseph Smith to Starhawk to Osama bin Laden to Richard Dawkins. Would you really describe all these as adding up to some narrow "spiritual coherence"? Only if you reduce each of them to whatever particular quality they might be said to share--which quality seems to be their indifference to Chestertonian Catholicism.

The glorified clique, the world populated entirely by the same kind of soul, is heaven. I look forward to calling Chesterton on this little mistake when I finally meet him in that other place.

ES...are you disagreeing with the strictly earthly meaning of Chesterton's assertion...ie, that people get pretty narrow when the only people they interact with are those they have specifically chosen...or only with the theological reference? That is, if an atheist or agnostic had said that same thing, and left out the part about Hell, would you have differed with it?

In my original post on the Chesterton quote, I said:

I think that Chesterton's words represent an important truth, but by no means the whole truth. It is true that much is lost in modern society to the extent that people only associate with others like them. But it is also true that much is lost in traditional societies to the extent that people are denied the opportunity to seek out others of similar interests. And also, in traditional societies, the "fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences" of which Chesterton writes are often to a large extent mediated by standardized and ritualistic behavior.

In colleges...especially "elite" colleges..there is already a lot of cliquish self-selection going on in the mere fact of attending the college. I can see why some might view a residence-based community as an important counter to even deeper layers of cliquishness. I suspect you're right, however, that except for a few unusual institutions led by exceptional people (who I'm guessing are not especially common in the ResLife trade) it doesn't really work all that well.

I'm disagreeing only with the theological reference.

Thanks for taking notice, Erin, and thanks for the thoughtful engagement. Much more of that is needed across the landscape.

I could offer many pages of commentary on your observations -- and my Collegiate Way website (collegiateway.org) does indeed provide hundreds of pages on the "residential college" or "house model" of campus life, as you know. For now, I'll just pluck out a few items.

"there is only so much you can do with a system designed to warehouse (monitor, "train," secure, and "educate") students at that awkward age"

This is exactly right, and on far too many campuses warehousing is the main function (advertising slogans to the contrary notwithstanding). If that's the state of affairs, then there's just not a lot you can do. The proper response is for students and parents to catch on, and take their money elsewhere.

"The real value of such arrangements does not manifest itself in the formal "academic programming" ... but in the relationships that arise, casually and easily and spontaneously, among students and the adults living and working in the house"

Also exactly right. Successful residential colleges and houses build up their community organically over time. "Overprogramming" (to use student affairs jargon) will kill the place. My answer for this, as for many things, is tea:

collegiateway.org/news/2006-college-tea

Building relationships, over the long term, comes first. From those relationships all sorts of good things, academic and non-academic, will grow naturally. But for those relationships to form, a stable and enduring environment must be provided; that's a foundation of the residential college idea:

collegiateway.org/foundations

And yet institutional policy in many cases actively undermines stability through segmented housing, differential pricing structures, and other policy-wonkish details wherein the Devil dwells. The result is an "endlessly rescrambled" residential life, as Reynolds Price termed it, that can't sustain anything of value.

"run by a marvelously charismatic man who happened to have a Ph.D. in English"

This is just another way to say that good leaders make a difference (something I never believed when I was young, before I had encountered really bad leaders).

"his popularity definitely ruffled some envious institutional feathers"

I could write pages on this phenomenon too, and I've seen it in multiple locations myself. It's the collision between the worldviews of personnel management and personal leadership, and you can find it coming up in discussions of military cohesion as well as education:

collegiateway.org/news/2003-managerialism

"absentee faculty who liked the free housing but didn't do much to enrich the life of the house. There were also Ph.D.'s who found their inner bureaucrats working in the Res Life system"

Yes, and this will occur as long as we employ human beings, unfortunately. But I'm not offering a plan for a perfect system; I'm offering a plan for a system that's on average going to be a lot better than what we've got.

It's a bit like saying, well, you know Zimbabwe has elections, and look how screwed up that place is, so I'm not sure elections are that great an idea. One of the virtues of small, locally-led, cross-sectional residential colleges is that systemic incompetence is harder to hide. In a big bureaucratic administrative division, who knows what everyone does? (There are something like 15 assistant and associate vice chancellors of student affairs at Berkeley; would any students even know if half of them never came into work?) But in a small "house" of perhaps 300-400, with only two or three people in charge, it's hard for incompetent individuals to be comfortable. That doesn't mean they won't pop up from time to time, just as corrupt leaders do via democratic elections; it only means they will be seen for what they are. In a small, cross-sectional environment where the faculty are in charge, the *potential* for success is far greater than it is in any other setting.

—Bob O'Hara

I think the Chesterton quotation is just right, David. And that's exactly what Harvard's president Lowell said when he argued for the creation of a house system at his institution in 1907:

"Character and self-reliance are more developed by being a man of mark in Ravenna than by belonging to the mob in Rome; and, what is more to our purpose, a body that is too large for general personal acquaintance tends to break up into groups whose members see little of one another. The citizen of a good-sized town has usually a wider acquaintance than the dweller in a big city."

It's also why I'm so opposed to theme halls: they are institutionally-sponsored cliques.

You're also correct that the core idea I'm recommending does not have to be connected to physical residences. The term "residential college" has become attached to the idea, but I always say that the emphasis is on the word college as a small, cross-sectional, membership society, not on the word residential. In fact, I'm particularly excited by the growing interest in this idea at non-residential community colleges and secondary schools, where we would speak of "houses" rather than residential colleges. A vertical advising system gets us a long way there, and the same kind of network of mutual aid can develop in non-residential settings as in residential settings.

(Added in response to the later comments: One of the virtues of a college or house system within a larger institution is that it offers all the advantages of a small community while continuing to remain part of a big one. The old question of which is better, a small school or a big school, is cancelled; the answer is, you can have both. This is a long standing argument for the collegiate/house model, for example as expressed by Berkeley's Robert Gordon Sproul in 1930:

collegiateway.org/news/2008-bowles-hall

The creation of an initial residential college at Berkeley, Bowles Hall, was unfortunately not replicated: the tide of Germanification was too strong at the time. But the story of current attempts by alumni to revive this residential college is very encouraging.)

—Bob O'Hara