The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1 - 110

S. Stewart Gordon

On any campus the most
important argument
against large-scale livinglearning centers is the
problem of faculty.

him to remain in the university and to live on
campus. Costs must be watched; over-expansion could mean failure, since there are limits
on both the number of students truly interested and the number of faculty who can or
should spend the amount of time necessary.

OTHER LIVING SETTINGS
The experimental residential college, although
it carries with it an aura of glamour, is not
the last or necessarily the best word in higher
education. Without any pretense of being educational, fraternities and sororities in many
places have changed in nature and now look
more like co-ops than social clubs. Students
save money by doing their own cleaning, ordering and serving food, and so on. These
“co-ops” offer community, without the added
dimension of having all members working together in a common curriculum.
Natural groupings are those of students in
a residence hall, or when it is too large, wing or
floor groupings. Whatever the size, the essence
of a group is cohesiveness. Stephen Hatch
studied two women’s halls in a British university; one, to which the pseudonym “Kennett”
was given, seemed to have a sense of collective identity, and the other, called “Avon,” did
not. In Kennett there were “a number of hall110

spirit activities such as enthusiastic participation in rag-day activities, ‘raids’ on and from
a nearby men’s hall, and so on.” Kennett had
a strong student government and its officers
had visible rewards, such as first choice of
rooms and opportunity to sit at heads of tables
at formal meals. This sounds like the fraternity and sorority organizations of the 20s and
30s in the United States. But Britain has not
been without its dissident students, and the
anomaly seemed just as obvious there:
It may seem difficult to reconcile the tight,
cohesive system represented by Kennett
Hall with the popular image of the modern,
protesting, permissive student. Surely one
would expect the students of today to leave
the hall as quickly as they possibly could.
But in fact the great majority of students
were most reluctant to leave the hall, and
the warden was faced with a difficult task in
deciding who should leave at the end of each
summer term to make room for the requisite
quota of freshers. Thus 91 per cent of our
1967 Kennett sample of seventy-six stayed on
for a second year; only one of the students
left the university, and only seven moved
out of the hall into other accommodation;
three of them of their own volition, and four
because there was not room in the hall. In
contrast, a high proportion (43 per cent) of
the original Avon sample of fifty-eight were
no longer in the hall for their second year.
Four had left the university altogether and
all the remainder who replied and who
were no longer in hall (14) had moved out of
their own volition. Despite the open nature
of the hall regime, they tended to prefer an
even freer environment where they were
not subject to fixed mealtimes and could
prepare their own food. Further evidence of
the strong positive involvement of Kennett
students in their hall is the fact that 51 per

THE JOURNAL OF COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY STUDENT HOUSING

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1