With the imminent construction of Duke's new Central Campus, members of the administration hope the ideal "quad model" will come to fruition.
"The whole goal of the first year is to expand your horizons, meet new people, get out of your comfort zone," said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs. "Central will be that adult transition."
But what comes in between freshman and senior year is an arrangement of quadrangles on West Campus that has been under development since 2002-the year the quad system was implemented.
When students moved into their dormitories in Fall 2002, a new policy required all sophomores to live on West Campus.
Fraternities and selective houses were uprooted from Main West Quadrangle and moved into the inner quads, and the West-Edens Link-now known as Keohane Quadrangle-opened its doors to students, housing 350 residents.
The most recent residential addition to West Campus, the WEL replaced a parking lot that separated Main West from Edens Quadrangle, bridging a physical gap between West Campus residents.
Prior to the changes, sophomores could choose to live on either West or Central. Many students and administrators, however, concluded that this system caused a rift between students because many minorities chose to live on Central, leaving West as a stereotypically greek-dominated community.
By establishing a system in which all sophomores live together in quads on West, the University hoped to promote community among the class-similar to the freshman community forged on East Campus.
"I don't think it's beyond our powers to devise a system in which we have clusters of people living near each other who have relatively common goals without creating a fraternity ghetto or a selective living angle in which everybody is off by themselves," former President Nan Keohane told The Chronicle in 2000, before the renovations and changes began.
Linking-in which each freshman dorm corresponds to a West Campus quad-was also instituted in 2002 to allow students to maintain friendships with students from their freshman dorms.
The policy was eliminated in early 2006, however, this time to allow students to maintain relationships with friends they had made from other freshman dorms.
But two years after the new quad model was put into place, it had only partially achieved its goals of bringing students-particularly sophomores-closer together.
Though quad councils had blossomed and served their purpose of bringing residents' concerns to the appropriate administrators and hosting quad-centered activities, many students said they moved into a quad but never branched out beyond their own social circles from freshman year.
"It's not where I would go to meet new people," then-junior Stephanie Weber told The Chronicle in December 2004. "I would go to a barbecue to get food, not to make new friends. I mean, no one else is going there to meet me."
Moneta said there are significant differences between students of different years that the evolving quad model hopes to address.
"Freshmen are different than sophomores are different than juniors are different than seniors," he said. "As maturity increases, needs are different."
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