Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 05:04:46 EDT To: advise@MIT.EDU From: "C. M. R. Rezek" Introduction The Unified Student Proposal for an MIT Residential System is a comprehensive and systemic design. We believe it addresses the interests and concerns of all relevant stakeholders: future MIT students, the parents of undergraduates, Fraternities, Sororities, Independent Living Groups, Theme Houses, Residence Halls, graduate students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The Strategic Advisory Committee to the Chancellor and the united student governments of MIT: the Undergraduate Association, the Dormitory Council, the Interfraternity Council, and the Graduate Student Council composed and submit this proposal to Lawrence Bacow, the Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Motivation The Strategic Advisory Committee to the Chancellor (SAC) was created by the Chancellor in Fall 1998 as a continuation of the Student Advisory Group to the Task Force on Student Life and Learning. The purpose of the SAC is to provide student views and proposals to the Chancellor on an Institute-wide scope. The residence system is a natural area of concern for the committee, both because of its importance to the students of MIT and because the Chancellor will be making important decisions regarding its future. The student governments have paid close attention to the future of the residence system since the announcement by President Charles M. Vest in Fall 1998 that all freshmen would be required to live in residence halls in Fall 2001. The Residence System Steering Committee (RSSC) was charged by the Chancellor to design and submit a proposal for the residence system and will do so in October 1999. The membership of the RSSC was drawn from the undergraduates, faculty, alumni, and staff of MIT. We applaud the Chancellor's commitment to community based decision making and the countless hours of work the members of the RSSC devoted to creating their final proposal. We also thank the members of the RSSC for their willingness to listen to members of the MIT community integrate that feedback into their proposal. When the RSSC released a first draft of their proposal in April 1999, the student governments produced the Unified Student Response to the Phase II Status Report (USR). The USR included a section on the key values for the MIT residence system and responded to a number of the recommendations of the RSSC, but was not a comprehensive proposal for the residence system. The Final Report of the Residence System Steering Committee, released in September 1999, was significantly different from the Phase II Status Report. Many of these changes were recommended by the USR. Though the recommendations of this proposal differ from the Final Report of the RSSC in significant ways, the primary distinction is one of scope. We address issues from capital investment to system management to residential life programs. The MIT residence system is very complex and we believe that a broader approach is crucial to design success. We believe that our experience, expertise, and perspective, enhanced by the work of the Clay Committee, the Task Force on Student Life and Learning, the Lewis Commission, the office of Residence Life and Student Life Programming, and the Residence System Steering Committee could produce an excellent system and we believe we have done so. Methodology The Unified Student Proposal for an MIT Residence System was announced to the public on September 14, 1999. The committee actively advertised its efforts to the community at large through both paper and electronic publicity campaigns, and was featured prominently in campus media. The process was completely open and public - notes from all meetings were posted on the web for public perusal and comment. The composition of the report was done primarily by students, but input and feedback was solicited and received by students as well as faculty, staff, and alumni. We also used recent reports of the Institute, including but not limited to the report of the Task Force on Student Life and Learning, the Institute Dining Review, the Clay Committee, the Phase II Status Report and Final Report of the RSSC, and the various proposals submitted to the RSSC. Although the committee would have preferred to begin with a community-based needs analysis, followed by several iterations of community feedback, proposals, and amendments, the time available was severely limited. We did sense, however, a growing consensus among the student body of what the new residence system should be. Perhaps because of this common direction, we found it relatively easy to integrate the several separate sections drafted by internal task forces. We are encouraged that community members have responded to our calls for feedback by helping us build a better system, rather than criticizing our ideas as a narrow-minded proposal from an isolated group of people. The ideal community-wide process for creating a comprehensive design for the residence system would have taken more time than we had available. We would have begun by soliciting input from all members of the MIT community about the needs and goals of the residence system. This information would then be analyzed and integrated into a prioritized list of need and goals for the residences system. Drafts of the needs and goals analysis would be released to the community through several iterations to ensure that they were, indeed, the proper needs and goals for the residence system. All design proposals would then be judged against these established criteria. We would have then solicited design ideas and proposals from the community. We then would have taken these ideas and proposals and evaluated them by the established needs and goals of the residence system. We might have discovered that one proposal was a best fit for the residence system, but it is more likely that we would draw ideas from several proposals to create a system we believed was optimal. We would then pursue several iterations of community feedback to ensure that our proposal did meet the needs and goals of the residence system. The goal of this feedback process would not be to create the most popular residence system proposal, but to increase the number of eyes and minds working on the design. When we believed that the design was optimized we would present it to the Chancellor. We encourage the administration of the Institute to continue its current progress towards community-based decision making, as exemplified by the 1997 Institute Dining Review. Attention to proper needs analysis, stakeholder involvement, and performance assessment will continue to produce excellent system solutions in the future. This document represents the consensus of all members of the Strategic Advisory Committee to the Chancellor. Objectives We recommend that the Chancellor adopt this proposal as the blueprint for the future of MIT's residence system. Moreover, we believe it demonstrates that students can be involved in all levels of planning and can reconcile diverse interests through integrative design and negotiation.