In December 1993, Duke’s famous English professor Reynolds Price wrote a Chronicle op-ed in which he vociferously argued in favor of a residential system at Duke based on residential colleges. Since Price wrote, we’ve moved to an all-freshman East Campus. We moved all fraternities off the Main West Quad. We moved away from the house model entirely to a quad model. Each of the changes brought about unintended negative consequences, which each further change intended to remedy.
The administration deemed the house model a failure in the early 2000s. Now we’re reinstating it. How do we know that this go around will be any more successful?
The challenges inherent in implementing these changes bring to mind the words of a certain former secretary of defense: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
What is our biggest “known unknown?”
How will our current residential facilities hold up in the new model? Will they be adequate?
The house model idea is a good one. Each house should have a common room, a kitchen and a set of rooms ranging from doubles and singles to apartment-style suites. Will all our new houses have that? Absolutely not.
I sat down with Donna Lisker, associate vice provost of undergraduate education and co-chair of the committee charged with designing the transition (the other co-chair is Associate Dean of Residence Life and Housing Services Joe Gonzales) and asked about the challenges posed by our inadequate residential facilities.
Right now, each house can’t have the full panoply of amenities envisioned in the idea of the house model. Certainly, inequalities in facilities will persist after the transition.
Those in charge of the transition are not ignorant of the challenge posed by facilities. Stephen Temple, a senior and president of Campus Council admitted, “there is no question about it, there are architectural and geographical limitations [to the new model].” Lisker noted that renovation of existing spaces is a high priority. She said that, “as we transition to the house model, it will bring more attention to both the deferred maintenance and existing deficiencies [of current facilities].” There is no way to make the new houses identical, so the goal will, instead, be to make them equivalent.
There is a long-term commitment to this equivalency, backed, I believe, with the intention to invest resources. Don’t expect New Campus anytime soon. But initiatives like K4, which the University knew it could afford, and the Mill Village construction (an incremental improvement) on Central Campus are representative of the types of construction envisioned in the short to medium term.
Another of the “known unknowns” is how different this new iteration of the house model will be from that deemed a failure by administrators a decade ago. Temple insists that, “whenever we [the committee] have a major decision, I want us to take a step back and ask... whether or not it avoids pitfalls of what went wrong with the previous house model.”
Lisker, too, notes differences between what we’ll have in 2012 and what we had in 2002. Ten years ago, selective living groups occupied more (and more prominent) residential space than they do today. They were all concentrated in one area, not spread throughout the different quads. The differential fees in place 10 years ago, which made Central Campus cheaper than West Campus and so made it home disproportionately to students of color, have been abolished, and now where a student lives on campus is immaterial to the financial aid package one receives. But are these changes enough?
One of the key “known knowns” is that the design of residential governance will change significantly with the new model. Over the years, students lost a lot of the power they used to have to shape their residential experience. The new model represents devolution of power, a return to an era when we had greater autonomy.
A decade ago each house had its own president and treasurer. Houses could charge dues, host social events and distribute rooms among members (goodbye, Room Pix!). The empowerment architecture of the new houses should top the priority list of those designing the new model.
I remain skeptical that our current facilities are adequate for a return to a house model. I am not sure that once we do return that the inadequacies of the system in place a decade ago will have been resolved. But I know this: The new model should empower students. And for the sake of having just that much more control over our experience at Duke, we ought to welcome the transition.
But students and administrators must both beware of the “unknown unknowns.” We don’t want to be doing this all again a decade from now.
Gregory Morrison is a Trinity senior and former Duke Student Government EVP. His column runs every Tuesday.
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