Perhaps the most dramatic campus change in the CLASS vision will be the creation of residential clusters. Currently, students living on campus have a choice of residence halls, but in most cases that decision is driven primarily by a combination of convenience and cost. While social considerations affect the selection of roommates and suitemates, few halls have a sense of greater community permeating them.
Clusters would be designed to change that by dividing the available facilities into distinct groups, much like the Commons system of Middlebury College (one of the five CLASS benchmarking schools reviewed at July’s presidential retreat). They would be designed to encourage students to develop affinities not just for their class years and RPI as a whole, but also for their cluster. This relationship would start with a freshman’s first residence and would ideally extend even beyond graduation.
Each cluster would consist of one or more facilities and would be supervised by an assistant dean who would live in Rensselaer-owned housing, either in or very close to the cluster residence halls. The cluster deans would be responsible for programming and community-building within their respective domains. The specific activities they would facilitate could vary greatly, depending on their tastes, the preferences of their residents, and possibly even cluster-specific traditions. They would be given the financial and physical resources to be flexible in this regard.
Ideally, clusters would also be physically separated from each other. Particularly on Freshman Hill, where halls from several clusters would be in close proximity with each other, establishing boundaries would be important to fostering identity and unity within each separate community. While these would probably not go so far as a wall or fence dividing the campus, they may manifest themselves as landscaping changes, or perhaps even signage that would clearly label a given cluster.
