Introduction

Gathered at a Lake George resort in the heat of early July, members of the Institute’s administrative leadership sat down to go over a detailed review of the residential systems in place at five other northeastern colleges and universities. The schools in question (featured on the opposite page) represent a diverse set of educational methods, community environments, and academic portfolios. Four of them share similar models of residential “clusters”: distinct sub-organizations of on-campus residence options that allow for additional opportunities for community affiliation. The fifth doesn’t have such a setup, but had recently underwent a major reformation of its greek life program.

The five studies were compiled by Laban Coblentz, the president’s chief of staff and the associate vice president for policy and planning; Prabhat Hajela, the vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Education; Eddie Ade Knowles, the vice president for Student Life; Jim Nondorf, the vice president for Enrollment; and Bill Walker, the vice president for Strategic Communications and External Relations. Together, the studies constituted one of the first concrete steps towards the implementation of a wide-reaching new vision for the Division of Student Life at Rensselaer. The initiative, dubbed Clustered Learning, Advocacy, and Support for Students, had been approved earlier this year by both President Shirley Ann Jackson’s cabinet and the Board of Trustees. Its goals were to improve the quality of the student experience at RPI by growing the support mechanisms for both undergraduates and graduates, fostering more communities that students could relate to throughout their tenure at the Institute, and more tightly integrating the academic and residential experiences to create rich living and learning environments.

The Sophomore-Year Experience

A key component of the overall vision of CLASS is the improvement of the year-to-year experience of freshmen to seniors. In particular, Vice President for Student Life Eddie Ade Knowles and Assistant Vice President for the Student Experience Lisa Trahan are looking to build upon the success of the Office of the First-Year Experience to create a complementary system for second-year students. The Sophomore-Year Experience would provide ongoing support to individuals as they continue to transition to increasingly independent roles in life. This would come in the form of programming and advisement, much like FYE offers, but catering to a more mature and experienced audience.

In order to make that sort of nurturing environment successful, sophomores will be required to live in on-campus housing. This mandate is currently set to take effect in the Fall 2010 semester, according to Knowles, and will thus affect next year’s incoming students—those enrolling in the Class of 2013.

Exempt from this requirement will be students living in certain greek housing. Fraternities and sororities that use the Institute bursar to handle room and board income will be permitted to house sophomores under the new policy.

Even considering the opportunities provided by greek housing, current facilities are insufficient to accommodate the extra demand for on-campus housing that the sophomore requirement would create. The shortage is underscored by recent increases in students interested in Institute residence halls.

According to Trahan, 2,963 students are currently living in university housing; of those, 597 freshmen and 21 upperclassmen are living in triple-occupancy rooms. There are currently 81 unfilled beds on campus.

Corresponding comprehensive programs for the junior and senior classes are not currently part of the overarching vision, but the concept of class deans is being revived to facilitate smooth experiences throughout a student’s time at Rensselaer. Class deans under the current plan would join a class at the sophomore year and would stay with it until graduation. They would be responsible for programming and would also stay abreast of students’ academic progress. Class deans would report directly to the assistant vice president for the Student Experience.

Similar class dean systems have been attempted at RPI in recent history. Most recently, 2004 saw the appointment of Dean of Students Mark Smith as the class dean for the Class of 2007, but that program eventually failed without successive deans being named. The concept has been a common theme in Institute program planning, however, appearing multiple times in President Shirley Ann Jackson’s annual town meetings and the performance plans for the Division of Student Life.

Residential Clusters

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.

Faculty Involvement

A key innovation of the cluster model will be the integration of academic programs with the residential experience. This is a nod to the concept of living and learning communities, a focal point of The Undergraduate Plan spearheaded by Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education Prabhat Hajela to fulfill objectives of The Rensselaer Plan. The ultimate goal of such groups is to foster an atmosphere of intellectual stimulation within themed student residential organizations.

Current plans call for two senior faculty members to be given appointments within the cluster system, much like the masters of the Yale residential college model (another institution investigated by the CLASS benchmarking team). The clusters would be divided between these faculty members, who would report to the dean of Residence Life in addition to their normal academic departmental duties.

These senior faculty members would live in Institute-owned housing very close to RPI’s residential campus. This would allow them to host informal events for the students in their clusters, ranging from dinners and social gatherings to more intellectual endeavors such as guest speakers and study sessions.

The faculty “masters” would establish a core academic presence within the Rensselaer residential system. Assisting them in the current vision of the CLASS plan would be other faculty fellows—not necessarily senior faculty members—who would be tied to specific clusters, although they would not necessarily live in them. These fellows would establish a presence within their clusters—perhaps by giving casual presentations or by occasionally joining students in the dining halls—and would help to promote a scholarly atmosphere while improving ties between students and their professors.

Other Residential Considerations

While the primary focus of the CLASS vision is on changes to residential life, it will have an effect on how all students live. In addition to the cluster deans, a new position will be created that will deal specifically with off-campus residents. The new associate dean will help provide the support services to ensure that students living independently of Institute housing can succeed.

Additionally, part of the idea of cluster residence halls is that students will retain an identity with their cluster even after they move out of it. Thus, even off-campus residents will be able to participate in special events hosted by their community, and they could make use of the programs available there if they wanted.

Fraternity and sorority life will also see some changes. The Office of Greek Life will eventually transition from the Dean of Students Office, where it currently is, to the Office of Residence Life. According to Smith, the move is designed to bring greek houses under the same umbrella with the other student residence constituencies. He noted, though, that the transition itself will not have a significant impact on the overall governing structure of greek life, as the entire department will be transplanted.

Another possible sticking point for the greeks has been the notion that fraternity and sorority houses will be classified as Institute housing for the purposes of the sophomore residential requirement and housing grants that appear as part of students’ financial aid packages. Only chapters that handled their room and board fees through the Institute bursar are able to take advantage of those benefits, however.

Several chapters were originally wary of this arrangement, as they thought it might handicap their ability to determine their own membership or to handle their own finances. Many of the concerns have largely been ironed out, though. According to Smith, the program is entirely optional, and only the house’s room and board costs (as determined independently through a confidential pro forma review) need to be handled through the bursar; additional dues may remain the responsibility of the chapter if that is desired.

Smith also stressed the fact that the Institute will not attempt to use the faux on-campus status to influence the membership of any chapter.

Both Interfraternity Council President Brian Keating ’10 and Panhellenic Council President Karen Mack ’09 said that the feedback regarding these changes that they have been hearing from their member chapters has not been overwhelmingly positive or negative.

Advising

The cluster model deans, including the faculty masters, will join with the class deans to increase the number of “touch points” that each student has with the Institute. Together, they will strengthen an existing web designed to keep students from, as Knowles described it, “falling through the cracks” in their academic journeys. They will be able to provide improved advising, both in terms of academic curricula and career planning.

The class deans and faculty masters will participate in a new academic advising committee (chaired by Trahan and Hajela) that, according to Knowles, will be “charged with making a more robust academic advising structure.” He said that what the CLASS benchmarking saw at other institutions made abundantly clear the fact that Rensselaer’s current structure puts far too much stress on single individuals, thereby harming the overall advising process.

Knowles also noted that advising should extend well beyond the question of, “What classes should I take?” His vision involves making use of all available resources to ensure that students have as much guidance as they need to navigate their academic lives and beyond. Accordingly, upperclassman and graduate student resident and learning assistants would play a much greater role in the process.

Due to their daily interactions with the undergraduate body, the cluster and class deans will also be able to provide additional feedback to the cross-division intervention team. This committee, also chaired by Trahan, meets weekly to discuss issues confronting specific students. By pulling inputs from the Student Health Center, the Department of Public Safety, Residence Life, the Advising and Learning Assistance Center, and others, the committee strives to detect potential personal issues so they can be addressed before they cause significant harm.

In describing the intervention team, Knowles referred to the recent tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute that resulted in the deaths of 32 community members. He noted that many different campus institutions had recognized that the perpetrator was having issues, but that nothing happened: “That one man came up on different radar screens, and nobody intervened.”

Such a situation would not happen at Rensselaer, according to Knowles, because of the intervention team that we have always had in place; the new additions would reinforce those safety measures even further.

Looking to the future

The CLASS initiative is still very much a vision; very few concrete details exist at this point. Even nomenclature has yet to be worked out in any detail—the clusters may eventually be called anything from residential academies to neighborhoods, and no consistent titles have been worked out for the new dean positions. The actual responsibilities and interactions of all these figures are also currently very vague and will be topics of ongoing discussion for a long time to come.

Actual deadlines for the various phases of the plan to be completed also aren’t firm yet. Many aspects were incorporated into the draft of the Fiscal Year 2010 Student Life Performance Plan that Knowles presented to the student body Monday. Admissions representatives have also begun to inform prospective students of the two-year residency requirement. Beyond that, however, there are very few aspects that aren’t flexible with respect to the CLASS implementation timeline.

Even the draft hiring schedule that was approved by the Board of Trustees has been cast into doubt by the suffering economy. The financial crisis has driven the Institute to defer to contingency budgets for the current fiscal year and a hiring freeze has made it impossible to proceed with some of the initial staffing plans.

Knowles said he is attempting to get approval to continue searches for certain key positions, such as a new dean for Residence Life. Until some restrictions are lifted, however, it will be necessary to postpone much of the planning and implementation process.

Student Reaction

Student reception of the CLASS initiatives thus far has been mixed; general confusion about the exact plans has contributed to some unease. Andrew Neidhardt ’11, chair of the Student Senate Student Life Committee, said that so far he had seen a lot of questions but not a lot of answers.

“We don’t know everything about it,” noted Neidhardt, adding that the circumstances make it unsurprising that students are “adverse to change.”

Those who have had the opportunity to hear a more thorough description of the administration’s vision have been more receptive to the idea, however. Grand Marshal Kara Chesal ’09 said that she was comfortable with most of the basic tenets of the proposal after she had had an opportunity to get the details.

Another typical concern has been that massive changes were being made without sufficient input from the student body, although this has partially been a result of misunderstanding regarding how much of the vision had already been translated to concrete plans.

In an attempt to ensure that student input is garnered for the rest of the development of implementation details, the Senate passed a resolution on November 3 that called for the creation of a multilateral committee to review the feasibility and logistics of the CLASS initiative. Both Knowles and Trahan said they welcomed and were excited about the resolution, and at Monday’s Performance Plan Review meeting, Knowles called it an “endorsement” of the plan.

Although they noted that this characterization may not be entirely correct, both Neidhardt and Chesal expressed that the resolution accomplished what it was designed to, and that the administration “understands that we really want to be involved in the process.”

Neidhardt added that he felt confident that students will have an adequate amount of input into the process, adding that student expression was crucial to the successful launch of the First-Year Experience program. He also emphasized that students wishing to get involved in the process should contact either his committee or the Senate.