A CREATIVE TENSION

ORDER OF CONTENTS
Background
Complementary Ideas of Community
Building on Existing Communities
The Importance of Choice
Residence-Based Advising: What Works and What's Feasible
The Role of Dining in College Life
Weaknesses of the College System
The Role of Cross-Residence Activities
Summary
References and Further Reading

BACKGROUND

From Thursday 15 April to Sunday 18 April 1999, two teams of undergraduates, graduate students, and teaching and administrative staff from MIT visited Cambridge University to gather information on the Cambridge college system, and to see what aspects of that system might be adaptable to MIT. This is the report of one of those teams.

MIT is by no means the only American institution to have looked to Oxbridge for inspiration. Indeed, the history of American postsecondary education in this century is replete with appeals to the English system. As these proposals have been driven as much by American ideas of Oxbridge as by the English reality, many have failed to live up to expectations. American students and educators must realise that much of the Cambridge system is essentially a product of the English culture in which it is rooted. The European emphasis on early specialisation, the influence of the English public school on social and residential expectations, and the fact that the college system antedates the modern emphasis on research all bear on the means by which interactions among students and faculty can arise. Though we may borrow some aspects, it would be unrealistic of us to attempt to emulate Cambridge in all of its particulars.

The place of Cambridge in English society is in many ways analogous to that of MIT in American culture. Cambridge has been known for mathematics since the time of Newton. It was Cambridge that saw the development of Maxwell's equations and of the first electronic stored-program computer. The surrounding town is home to many small technology firms, and there is increasing emphasis on applied research and liasons with industry. One of the postwar colleges, Churchill, has an explicit focus on science and engineering.

Because our practical interest lay in an American adaptation of the college community, we sought to compare the Cambridge experience to that of a peer institution here in the United States. The California Institute of Technology's emphasis on science and engineering makes it an excellent comparison for MIT, and its small size makes it relevant to the English idea of the college community. We therefore sent one team member (YL) to gather information at CalTech. This report examines the Cambridge system and the adaptibility to MIT of some of its aspects, drawing on CalTech as an example of a small, scientifically oriented community.

COMPLEMENTARY IDEAS OF COMMUNITY

What do we mean when we say `community'? Much of the debate over the future of the residence system at MIT has stemmed from differing interpretations of what `community' is and how it might be achieved. The term has at least two main senses, which might be differentiated as community-in-the-large and community-in-the-small. The former refers to the social and ideological glue that makes of an institution a university, the latter to the diversity and individualism that sustain the university. The apposition of community-in-the-small and community-in-the-large produces what one of our Cambridge hosts described as `a constant creative tension' between the university and the residential groups -- an interplay that gives the university its spirit. The experience of Cambridge, and the ways in which that experience has been reconstructed within American institutions and culture, have much to tell us about the task we face in planning for the future of the residence system at MIT.

At Cambridge we witnessed how community-in-the-large arises naturally in the conjunction of many residence-based, close-knit communities-in-the-small. While the individual colleges give a personal character to each student's experience, university-wide activities give a distinctive colour to the campus as a whole. This synthetic approach allows students the academic and social resources of a large school while preserving those of a small college. Of special importance in this arrangement is students' ability to feel committed to their colleges. The lengthy history of the college system, and even the nature of the conflicts that have arisen within it, bear witness to the strength of this approach.

BUILDING ON EXISTING COMMUNITIES

In Cambridge's early history and also during the growth in enrollments of more recent years, colleges have arisen more by necessity than by design. The strength of the university has been in its building a deliberate system out of what already existed. Although the original, medieval colleges were little more than student hostels, these developed into lively communities with which students identified very closely and which became essential to university life. In fact, a nineteenth-century experiment with non-collegiate university students soon resulted in the participants' organising into a college of their own, Fitzwilliam. Cambridge as an institution has recognised that community-in-the-large is founded on community-in-the-small; the university provides common resources and a focus for the colleges, and the colleges contribute their energy and initiative to the university. The colleges have grown up around the university, and the university has embraced and extended them.

It is worth mentioning that residence design processes at other American institutions have been successful in this strategy of building on existing structures. We wish in particular to cite the example of Cornell, where one of us (MB) was involved in the redesign process. Cornell's original proposal of randomising freshman housing assignment was met with intense resistance from all subgroups of the campus community. In a debate remarkably similar to that which has occurred at MIT, students from theme houses, fraternities and sororities, and less formally organised residence groups complained that the effort to impose community-in-the-large would disrupt the many communities-in-the-small in which students had so much invested. In the end, a compromise solution retained freshman housing choice and full participation of freshmen in the theme houses. Indeed, the plan built on the strengths of the theme houses by creating a residential college system in which all students would be able to benefit from the kind of small, close-knit community that the theme houses had pioneered. Each house contributed to the planning of cross-residential programs that would forge `a "community of communities" in which each individual and group is affirmed for its own contribution and expected to contribute to the broader community as well.' In this model, community-in-the-small does not detract from community-in-the-large, but instead, through academic and recreational ties, creates it.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHOICE

Critical to the success of the Cambridge's college system is students' ability to find a college with whose focus and spirit they can identify. The importance that students attach to college choice testifies to the significance of this decision. The students with whom we spoke at New Hall told us that the selection of a college is a very central decision for sixth-formers. Although the university does accept open applications with which a student may be placed in any of the colleges, very few students choose this route. Cambridge's thirty-one colleges offer an impressive array of choices based on reputation and traditions, wealth and subsidies, location and physical atmosphere, academic focus, size, and coeducational options. From the artsies and ravers at King's, to the more traditional set of the mathematicians at Trinity, to the vibrant mix of technologists and artists at Churchill, people of every background and emphasis seem to find a niche at Cambridge. The strength of this arrangement arises from the wide array of options available to students from the beginning of their time at the university. In this system there are no `bad' choices, only different ones. Incoming students are entrusted with the responsibility of choosing their own college, just as they have the responsibilities of choosing their course of study and of managing their time in preparation for end-of-year exams.

Housing assignment at CalTech is similar in that there is mutual selection of students and houses. The CalTech system has more in common with MIT than with Cambridge, however, since students applying to houses have already been admitted to the university. During Rotation, CalTech's analogue of R/O Week, entering students are assigned temporarily to one of the houses and then take meals at a different house each day. The week-long Rotation covers each of the seven houses, and students rank their top four choices of house. Much like the Language Houses at MIT, the houses confer among themselves to decide whom they want to keep. As at MIT, the orientation process at CalTech is calculated to expose incoming students to potential hallmates with an intensity that cannot be achieved in a system such as Cambridge's. This detailed introduction is all the more necessary because of the lack of space at CalTech and MIT in comparison to Cambridge, where most students are housed in single rooms. Very significant in student satisfaction with this system is the fact that both the incoming students and the upperclass members of the houses have a say in deciding with whom they will live. The spirit and cohesiveness that this policy gives to each house cannot be underestimated: only two to three students each year switch houses, and every house evolves a distinctive culture. A feeling of involvement with and acceptance by the houses gives students an impetus to contribute their own ideas and energies to the management of the house. That students consider these places their own homes is evident even in surface characteristics such as the distinctive murals within each house. In addition to choice within the House system, CalTech accommodates all students who wish to opt out of the system by moving into university-owned apartments off campus.

RESIDENCE-BASED ADVISING: WHAT WORKS AND WHAT'S FEASIBLE

At Cambridge, the primary responsibility and importance of the colleges is that of providing homes for their students. These are homes not only in the physical sense of a place to live, but also in the more general sense of an environment of friends and advisors. This support is a hallmark of the college experience from the very beginning of a student's tenure. At Queens' College, for instance, our student guide described the College's system of assigning a `student parent' to each incoming student, in a manner quite analogous to the big-sib schemes of many of MIT's living groups. The involvement of second-year and third-year students with first-years is one of the system's strengths. In addition to these student-to-student arrangements, each student in each college is assigned a Tutor, a faculty fellow of the college who is responsible for the student's general welfare. Tutors are purposely selected from outside the student's course of study, in order to separate academic relationships from pastoral ones. Tutors take meals in college, and receive an allowance for hosting affairs at which they and their students can gather informally. Many tutors live in college, although such arrangements are often limited by the lack of family accommodations. These arrangements for individualised attention help to make Cambridge's rate of on-time degree completion an enviable 97%.

The Cambridge colleges' roles in pastoral advising and in academic advising often are cited in the same breath; however, these dual roles have very different origins, and some aspects of the academic role may be less practical for an American university to emulate. While the tutorial system has existed for centuries, Cambridge's system of individually supervised study was an invention of the late Victorian era. Each student's Director of Studies assigns supervisions for each of the lectures in which the student is enrolled. Supervisions are individual or small-group study sessions usually involving from one to three students. Supervisors are members of the student's own college, or in a few cases fellows of another college with which faculty are shared. Supervisions for first-year lectures are often run by postgraduate students, while more advanced topics are handled by college fellows.

The system of supervisions is politically embattled, and susceptible to some of the same social pressures as exist in an American university. Not the least of these is the competition between teaching and research for faculty members' time. The typical fellow must juggle university lecturing, college supervisions, research, and administrative responsibilities within the college and on university bodies, in addition to the more informal involvements of college life. As government support for teaching has diminished, emphasis has shifted to research as a source of funding, and teaching responsibilities have been neglected. Mirroring observations from many of their American counterparts, our student hosts told us that many of the most committed supervisors were the postgraduate students, and that the fellows often seemed uninterested or preoccupied. The pressure to publish original research has resulted in a system in which many supervisors feel that they can't afford to spend much time on students. The contract as to what a fellow is to contribute to the college community has always been an unwritten one, but the pressures on the system have grown so pronounced that at least one college, Pembroke, is considering placing these responsibilities in writing.

In an American setting, even in the early part of this century it was recognised that a successful relationship between student and supervisor is a voluntary one: when Woodrow Wilson modelled Princeton's system of preceptors on Oxbridge, he carefully avoided foisting preceptorial responsibilities on Princeton's research-oriented faculty. At MIT, adding residence-based, one-on-one tutoring to the research burdens of faculty might be impractical. Instead of recreating these particulars of the Cambridge experience, MIT might adopt the more abstract Cambridge strategy of building a deliberate system out of what has already arisen out of necessity. One-on-one tutoring already goes on in MIT living groups -- between upperclass students and freshmen, between students and Resident Tutors, and between fellow students taking the same course. By encouraging these activities and expanding them to include interested members of the faculty and staff, MIT can achieve an individualised system of instruction similar to that of Cambridge in its efficacy, albeit not in its particular details.

This sort of individualised support that reaches into the residences is important especially during a student's first term. At CalTech, a student told our representative of a freshman experience whose triumphs and dangers are very much like those at MIT: `Before some students arrive at Caltech, they can boost their self-confidence by reassuring themselves of their intellect, their smarts; at Caltech, this becomes a different situation, because the classes are so difficult, and everyone else around you is pretty intelligent.' Such an environment can threaten students' sense of self-worth, and thus it becomes even more important for students to feel in control of their lives. CalTech's honour code is a very significant step in returning control to the students: `Being honest becomes something that you can cling to, that you are proud of. In a less negative sense, the honour code lets you know that your grades are your own responsibility. You decide when to take your test, you decide when to do everything. You have the ultimate control over your life here.'

THE ROLE OF DINING IN COLLEGE LIFE

In addition to Cambridge's tutorial arrangements, communal dining is a central element of college culture. Much of college life revolves around the college bar, in which members of the college and their guests can relax and socialise. The college's small size gives its bar much of the character of a neighbourhood pub. Given English culture and law, the college bars all serve alcohol; however, the role of the bar as a community centre seems somewhat separable from the nature of the beverages served. In the United States, coffeehouses serve as similar gathering places.

Each college has its own dining hall where members of the college meet for meals. `Formal hall', a periodic formal meal with table service, is an occasion to which to invite friends from outside the college as well as to catch up with other members of the college, rather akin to the evening meals in FSILGs. A representative from Cambridge's student government cautioned us, though, that simply eating in one place doesn't by itself create community. Speaking of the college officials, he told us, `a lot of them go, "if we all eat together then we're going to be great friends."' A distinction must be drawn between the image of community and a substantive community. The latter requires not only a forum for interaction but also a set of shared interests that can form a basis for interaction. Substantive community will arise only if each residence comes together around a common theme. (For further discussion of this point, see the description of theme housing in our residence design proposal.) The colleges differ widely in the degree to which dining is used as a forum for interaction among students and fellows -- to take an extreme example, the tradition of one older college is to have the faculty dine by themselves on a dais! Dining's success as a social forum seems to depend both on interest among students and fellows, and on existing cultural barriers. At CalTech, where living groups are somewhat smaller than at Cambridge, meals become a social focus because students living in close proximity have already had a chance to weaken these barriers.

WEAKNESSES OF THE COLLEGE SYSTEM

Although the college system in general is a strength, not all of its features deserve emulation. Administrative staff at Cambridge complained to us about the consequences of the colleges' fierce independence. Politically, the existence of thirty-one separate administrative units produces a lack of accountability: `No one is responsible for decisions,' complained one of the student government officers. University facilities to be shared among the colleges are often delayed because of lack of agreement or simply lack of communication. Financially, the operation of thirty-one copies of every little facility prevents the realisation of potential economies of scale. Although housing, pastoral advising, and most dining operations are usefully separated by college, other functions would be better implemented centrally. The operation of separate colleges does increase expenses, but in the experience of one of us (MB) who has worked at an English university with a non-collegiate residential system (Imperial College of Science and Technology), there's no comparing the two in terms of quality: at Imperial, once a student leaves the lecture hall or the computing laboratory, (s)he disappears into the blur of South Kensington, leaving little campus life outside of the academic departments.

When one considers these drawbacks, MIT's strong Institude-wide coordination in sport, student activities, the residence system, and some aspects of student government put us ahead of the game. The Institute community is not hampered by strong administrative divisions such as those that separate the Cambridge colleges. Nor is MIT life limited to what can be constructed around the academic departments, as is the case in many non-collegiate universities in England.

THE ROLE OF CROSS-RESIDENCE ACTIVITIES

Strong and supportive communities are continually built and renewed around the several colleges. But what of the university as a whole? An institution that lacks a common experience and a unifying theme risks devolving into the loose aggregation that University of California President Clark Kerr once termed the `multiversity.' At Cambridge, cross-residential activities give all of the colleges a shared focus. The most obvious of these university-wide activities are the academic departments, which bring together students and fellows from all the colleges. However, the 424 university-wide societies, as well as many more collegiate societies, complement curricular foci and cater to a wide array of interests. Any group of students can start a society, and as is the case with the selection of colleges, there is something for everyone. Many societies are devoted to sport, and many to theatre. The collegiate and university-wide levels of organisation allow students to experiment regardless of their level of skill, and students in collegiate societies come to know members of the corresponding societies in other colleges.

The small size of Cambridge allows for many such cross-residential connections. As our student guide in New Hall, one of the outlying colleges, put it, `some colleges are more insular than others, but this is due more to character than geographical distance.' Although some students move out of college and into college-affiliated houses, all students in residence are required to live within three miles of the city centre (and staff are required to live within twenty miles). This distribution is comparable to that of MIT living groups in Cambridge and Boston. The degree to which Cambridge residences are part of the university community is a function of their degree of participation in university-wide activities and their sponsorship of events open to all members of the university, and not so much a function of geographic distance.

If university-wide activities are to be relied upon to construct community-in-the-large, they must appeal to a cross section of the university population. At Cambridge, fellows and staff are involved in university-wide activities to a degree uncommon in American institutions. In America and particularly at MIT, it seems that non-student community members' relative lack of involvement in campus activities may stem from cultural expectations: because of differences in age and background, faculty and staff feel that entering into non-academic activities with students would be an intrusion. Thus campus activities remain student-dominated, and the cycle of exclusion is perpetuated. MIT should encourage its campus organisations and its community members to overcome this artificial division.

Another cross-residential unifying force is university governance. We were impressed by the degree of student participation in decision-making within the colleges and in the university as a whole. The governing body within each college, the Junior Combination Room (JCR), works with the JCRs of other colleges to plan events. New Hall's JCR, for instance, has strong links with those of Jesus, Clare, and Churchill. Since the 1960s, students have had a significant role in the governance of the university. The University Council includes three student members, two of whom are undergraduates. These students are permitted a one-year leave of absence from their studies so that they may concentrate their attentions on the business of student governance. Other members of the Council are drawn from heads of colleges, professors, readers, and lecturers. The Council provides a critical forum at the highest level of the administration, at which students, some of the most important stakeholders in the university, are involved in the process of executive decision-making. The Council structure is a working example whose role is similar to what we envision for our proposed Student Life Council. The Council's function is not advisory to any other body; it is the university's most senior executive decision-making body.

SUMMARY

Everything that we have seen at these institutions has indicated that a residence plan cannot be imposed on a campus community from without. In order to gain acceptance, a plan must build on the structures and objectives that the community has defined for itself. A successful residence system must allow students and other community members to participate in defining the environment in which they are expected to live and work. Cambridge and Caltech have different histories and accomplish this in different ways -- at Cambridge a university community was built on top of collegiate communities, whereas at CalTech the house system was coeval wth the notion of a university community. At both institutions, however, students and residence groups have the opportunity to select one another mutually. It is this availability of choice that gives residence-based communities their strength. Through cross-residential and university-wide activities, the combined initiative of these communities-in-the-small creates an overarching community-in-the-large.

Because of differences in history and culture, and because of the inefficiencies that arise from absolute independence of living groups, it would be unrealistic for MIT to try to implement a completely residence-based advising system as exists within the Cambridge colleges. However, non-academic advising can be more integrated with the residences. In order for advising to work, reponsibilities cannot be foisted on unwilling or overcommitted faculty. Instead, the relationship between advisors and students must be a voluntary one. An advising plan should make use of all members of the community, not just faculty, and it should build on the tradition of informal advising that already exists within MIT living groups.

Dining can be a very significant element in the construction of residence-based and campus-wide communities. However, it cannot be assumed that communities will arise simply because students and others are eating together in the same room. The nascent community must have some prior focus, some shared interest or experience that gives people a reason to start talking to each other. As long as such an environment exists, shared meal times can become a welcome social opportunity within an institution known for its high workload.

We thank the Residence System Design Steering Committee for the opportunity to visit Cambridge and to put our proposal in perspective. We trust that we have adequately discharged the responsibilities assigned to us, and look forward to further discussion of the information presented in this report.

Chris Beland	    Matthew Belmonte	Abbe Cohen	    Jason Gratt




Yvonne Lai	    Alice Man		Sarah McDougal

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

California Institute of Technology, The Little T: Caltech's Undergraduate Guide to Life, 1998.
Cambridge University, Annual Report 1997-1998.
Cambridge University, Undergraduate Prospectus 2000-2001.
Cornell University, Final Report of the Residential Communities Committee, December 1995.
Cornell University, Final Report of the Residential Communities Implementation Plan Steering Committee, September 1997.
Alex Duke, Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities (Yale, 1996).
Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1996).
Mark Weatherall, From our Cambridge Correspondent: Cambridge Student Life 1945-95 as Seen in the Pages of Varsity (Varsity Publications Ltd, 1995).