The Gray Area | Build a house of learning

A few months ago, I overheard a disturbing conversation as I was walking on the 38th Street bridge.

A girl was giving a tour of campus, and — as the group crossed the bridge — she said, “The academic part of campus really ends here.”

Unfortunately, the tour guide was right.

But it shouldn’t be that way. Areas of campus that solely feature residences should also be continuing the academic mission of the University.

In fact, that was the way the residences were originally envisioned. At Penn, each residential building has been called a “college house” and not a “dormitory” because the system was created with the idea of furthering the academic mission of the University within a residential setting.

“A dormitory is supposed to be a place that provides a set of services, and a college house will do those things as well, but the point of a college house is that the residents are also members of a community,” said Residential Advisory Board member and College junior John Gee. “One of the main ideas is that if you get a group of people who are in school together to live with each other, it will contribute to the sense that they are part of an academic community.”

A key way to create this sense of community within the college houses is through the residential programs. By having pockets of each college house focused on particular academic experiences, that culture and community can spread to the rest of the house.

But currently, many programs are not administered in a way that makes them rigorous or valuable for students. They also suffer from the stigma of being labeled “academic,” which somehow gets translated into the idea that they won’t be fun. Students often apply to the residential programs just to get into the Quadrangle or high rises and are therefore not inclined to take them seriously.

To help tackle this problem, the RAB and the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education have teamed up to write a document about improving the residential programs.

We conclude that “academic experiences” in the college houses are not the same as classroom experiences. That’s what makes them valuable.

For example, Gregory College House’s Modern Languages Program grants academic credit in Spanish, French and German. But that credit is not received in a typical fashion.

“It’s based on conversation and on activities that you do together like eating meals or watching movies and discussing them with each other,” Gee said. “The idea is that you’re living with each other so that the immersion is deeper.”

We have also concluded that more central oversight from College Houses and Academic Services is needed over the residential programs. When metrics are established for evaluation in the programs and they are examined at the end of each year, a culture of accountability will be brought into the system.

And we believe that there needs to be more student involvement to produce excitement and buy-in.

To do this, we have proposed and are hoping to pilot an experimental option. Instead of having residential programs that are set by administrators and staff and continued each year, there would be a set number of beds set aside for students to propose their own residential programs.

Students would fill out an application describing what their proposed program would entail, what events it would hold and which faculty advisors would be involved. They would also indicate which students would be interested in joining this new program.

The most innovative and well-planned program would win those beds. That way, students are driving the programs.

There is no doubt that there are very few classrooms once you cross the 38th Street bridge. But that crossing shouldn’t be a modern-day Rubicon. Our sense of academic community shouldn’t be leaving us.

Charles Gray is a Wharton and College junior. He is a member of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education. His e-mail address is gray@theDP.com. The Gray Area appears every Tuesday.

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