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The Housemaster's Role in Residential Life
Halston Taylor

For the first time in years, MIT has been experiencing a campus-wide discussion about the quality of student-faculty interactions and the gulf - intellectual and cultural - that divides the campus at Massachusetts Avenue. The substitute motion that passed the November faculty meeting concerning the residential system (see Page 3) reflected a desire among many faculty for the Institute to re-dedicate itself to finding meaningful ways for students and faculty to share more than lecture hall space during daylight hours. Although we do need to work to find new ways to improve upon the quality of student-faculty interactions all across the Institute, there is already one program in place that a select number of faculty have found especially rewarding over the years - MIT’s housemaster program.

For almost four decades now, virtually all of MIT’s dormitories have been home to a senior member of the MIT community, usually tenured faculty members, but occasionally untenured faculty and senior administrative staff. These individuals - the housemasters - serve as the representatives of the wider Institute within each student residence. Each dormitory is unique, as is each housemaster, and thus the role carved out by each housemaster is to a large degree unique. Still, there is a core of responsibilities that all housemasters share. Most importantly, housemasters help to provide leadership in each of the Houses. This doesn’t mean that the housemasters "run" the Houses; rather, housemasters work with the Residential Teams (students, house managers, and graduate resident tutors) to enhance the quality of life in each residence.

The prospect of living among a couple of hundred MIT students may seem overwhelming to the typical MIT faculty member, but it’s important to realize that housemasters aren’t alone. The students are responsible for a large array of activities, and each dormitory has a house manager, whose job it is to attend to the business and physical operations of the dormitory. Each dormitory also has a staff of graduate students - called "graduate resident tutors" - who actually live on the dormitory floors and are the first line of defense in mediating between the challenges of the Institute and student life. Finally, MIT has a superb student services support staff who can be called in for help in those few cases where the experience of a seasoned professional is needed.

If MIT faculty did not know it before, they certainly know now that each MIT residence, whether it be an on-campus dormitory or an off-campus independent living group, is home to strong student cultures. On the whole, the houses are self-governing, with students themselves having the responsibility for deciding everything from how "house taxes" will be spent to how residents will be assigned to rooms. This fact makes the job of housemaster in one of the dormitories challenging in certain respects - like all large, complex organizations with long histories, the dormitories are hard to change. But, student self-governance makes life easy for housemasters in many other important respects. In particular, housemasters don’t have to do it all. They can, and do, focus their attention on the few things they think are important, while mostly giving advice to those who are doing the lion’s share of actually running the dormitory on a day-to-day basis.

Just as every good teacher isn’t necessarily suited to teaching in large lecture halls, all MIT faculty are not suited to living among students as housemasters. And even those who are well suited in general to serve as housemasters aren’t likely suited to serve in every dormitory. Still, the faculty at MIT who perform this role gain a richer understanding of student life, and by and large find the role immeasurably rewarding.

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