In my last column about QuadEx, I wrote about how Duke’s attempt at housing reform could mature into the most positively transformative feature of Duke’s community if it implemented a coherent model around the fundamental core of shared spaces. The tree ring model of concentric layers to community growth provides a coherent vision for how QuadEx could become a beloved and admired feature of Duke, but there is another facet that will be crucial to its success, and which deserves its own treatment: the cultivation of a middle scale of housing community.
Between the smallest scale of roommates and the largest scale of the whole 250-to-500-person Quad, there is a fundamental need for a scale of community that is structured around the natural social niche of thirty to sixty people for QuadEx to be successful at building and sustaining real communities within the model.
Duke and QuadEx don’t currently appear to have a plan for this scale of community, although it existed for years in Greek life sections on campus, SLG sections and independent houses under older models of housing. It’s also true that QuadEx has several seemingly intractable problems with its implementation, including the inefficacy of Quad Councils, failure to fully incorporate LLCs and SLGs into the model, and a failure to follow through on its original mission of building continuous communities from East to West and beyond. All of these problems and more are resolved by the addition to the model of a middle scale of housing community.
But what would this scale look like within the existing QuadEx design, and how would it solve the problems that the current model for QuadEx cannot?
To give you the clearest idea of the answer to these questions, I’ll describe a student’s journey through their middle scale community at Duke. For clarity I’ll call the middle scale community group a ‘Hall’ to distinguish it from a House or a Quad. These communities could be called anything, but ‘Hall’ implies their core spatial component and scale while avoiding associations with other community group names already in use. The spatial component is the most pressingly important to develop — the core of the tree ring model is shared space, which is located so centrally because all of the components surrounding it will fail to thrive in its absence.
To begin describing a potential Duke student’s journey through a QuadEx with Halls, let’s start with Hannah, who enrolls at a hypothetical Duke where Halls have been part of QuadEx from the beginning. She starts her first semester in her East Campus House, Brown, enjoying the convenient location right next to Marketplace. She makes friends with people on her floor, and even more friends with her sister House, Alspaugh, because she’s earned a few points for the Quad Cup with them since they both compete for their linked Quad, Kilgo. That’s how she met her core friend group, made up of people on her floor and a few others in Brown and Alspaugh. They all grew especially close by spending time together in their common room late at night while finishing homework.
Hannah comes back from winter break to the spring of her first year, and pretty soon everyone is getting ready to choose their housing for the coming fall as sophomores. Hannah knows that as part of QuadEx she’ll be in Kilgo, but the Quad has a few hundred people, and she only knows a fraction of them. So she and her friends from Brown and Alspaugh rush Magnolia Hall, which is the set of rooms in Kilgo section I through L on the first and second floors. She knows that she’s guaranteed to get into a Hall, and that with it comes the community of the three or four dozen people she’ll be physically closest to. Once rush is over, the upperclassmen of Magnolia Hall hand over the reins and show Hannah and all her friends the ins and outs of their space, as well as some of the Hall traditions they’ll keep going in the coming year like Open Door Day, where you get to see all the rooms in the Hall. The upperclassmen will still be connected to the community they’ve built since they’ll move into Magnolia Hall’s section in Swift in the fall. Hannah and her Hallmates have an election before the Spring semester is over to decide who will be their Hall representative to the Quad Council, made up of representatives of all the Halls coming together. She wins by ten votes.
Hannah has a friend, Mihir, who lived in Pegram House, and rushed the Spire Fellows LLC for his sophomore year. That means his Hall is Spire Hall in Craven, which has a section in Hollows for when he comes back from his Junior Fall abroad next year. The LLC does many activities together, and Mihir’s Hall representative on the Quad Council makes sure they have the portion of the Quad Council budget they need to do everything from hosting a visiting professor to having more than enough pizza at their Super Bowl party.
Mihir’s friend Sophia had an older sibling at Duke who was in Mirecourt when the SLG still had a section on campus. Since the SLGs were reincorporated into the QuadEx model as Halls, she knew she wanted to rush Mirecourt Hall with her friends moving from Giles House into Crowell Quad. She had a friend who lived in Randolph but mostly hung out with people in Giles, so that friend rushed Mirecourt Hall too, and they were able to switch their Quad affiliation going into their sophomore fall. Every spring, there’s a Mirecourt All Hall party in their section where the newest members of each Hall get to meet the seniors who used to live there. Some years they even have alumni return. In her junior year, Sophia started working in a lab she learned about from someone she met at the All Hall Party.
In their senior year, Hannah, Mihir, and Sophia all returned to their Hall sections frequently for events and to connect with new members after the Spring rush. They loved teaching their first years about the Hall traditions and identities, and how each Hall identity possesses a component of the Quad Identity, like Kilgo’s Magnolia tree or Craven’s Raven. Hannah helped a first year student run to represent their Hall in the Quad Council. Mihir told someone where to order the best pizza for their Super Bowl party next year. And Sophia, who had just finished her distinction project in the lab she joined sophomore year, connected an interested first year student to her lab manager.
The details of these three cases — independent Halls, LLC Halls and SLG Halls — could easily be as vastly different as Duke students themselves are. But they illustrate how a middle scale of community could exist in a way that solves some of QuadEx’s weakest points. Every Duke student joins a Hall by selection from the bottom up or by default, because the model is exhaustive: Every room in the Quad is part of a three to five dozen block of physically adjacent rooms, building in a ground floor of belonging that doesn’t let students slip through the cracks of community structure as many do in QuadEx’s current design. There would be one resident assistant associated with each Hall, reinforcing the RA’s current efforts to build community while eliminating those efforts that are redundant with the Quad Council’s.
First among the problems a middle scale could solve for QuadEx is the fact that LLCs and SLGs could be woven into the framework without missing a thread, providing the same living-learning structure and community structure that these groups aspired to before QuadEx. It would even be possible to incorporate Greek life sections this way, although the likelihood of that ever happening seems low. However, the point stands that pre-QuadEx forms of middle scale communities could be seamlessly blended into the new model and preserve the richness those communities contribute to Duke overall, but only if we adopted a middle scale of housing community. In the current model, these groups are absent, detached or obliquely incorporated into their Quad’s community.
Secondly, the Quad Councils currently have considerable budgets, but sometimes poor engagement by the council members themselves and by the students at the events they organize. This is due to a variety of factors, but a significant one is that the Councils are composed of members who have no specific charge from any student or group of students, leaving their mandate and purpose for governing weak and unstructured. If the Councils were composed of representatives from each Hall — who are answerable to their Hallmates for the state of things, and who can confidently organize events they know their Hallmates will attend — the Councils would necessarily behave differently.
Thirdly, the place-based continuity that has the potential to exist from East Houses to West Quads accounts for only half of the time students matriculate at Duke — a middle scale community of Halls would exist not just in the Quads, but for juniors and seniors when they live in Hollows and Swift as well. QuadEx is well-known for attempting to remove selectivity from the housing process at great cost, but selectivity doesn’t have to happen from only the top-down direction. First-year students can select into their Halls from the bottom up through combined blocking and other means, letting them experience the benefits of that scale of intentional and equitable community.
Making QuadEx into the exceptional and beloved way we do housing at Duke will take many years of growth and investment, but it will also require creative leadership that innovates to bolster the weak spots of the model when they become apparent. A great arborist knows when to prune a tree’s branches and when to graft in new ones, and for QuadEx to mature and thrive, it’s going to need some creative modifications. The middle scale of housing communities should be the first one.
Nicholas Chrapliwy (T’22) is a staff member at the Sanford School of Public Policy and former Spark Fellow in the Office of Undergraduate Education. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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