Does anyone know when UChicago started their residential system? And which university was the first in the US to start residential college system?
Harvard and Yale started the Residential College system in the US in the 1930’s. Harvard called theirs the “House system” and Yale called theirs “Residential colleges” Not sure when the UChicago residential system kicked in, but here are some references that may prove useful.
Source: http://collegiateway.org/reading/morison-1936/
http://collegiateway.org/news/2002-sorkin-chicago
Looks like it had still not kicked in 2006. So it is fairly recent.
Princeton introduced residential colleges much later – one in the 1960s, one in the seventies, three in 1983. Lots of the buildings involved predated the residential college system. One more has been established since then and another is in the planning stages (to facilitate expansion of the student body). When I was there in the mid1980s as a grad student, the colleges were still peripheral, largely because of the eating clubs. But the Administration was making a concerted effort to change that. Don’t know how well it worked.
An old Chicago Tribune article states
So maybe it got started in the 70’s but matured as time went on.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-11-10/features/0211100178_1_dorm-turkish-living
Entry and exit patterns vary at different schools, I think.
Yale --enter as freshman, stay through senior year
Harvard – enter as sophomores (with friend groups), stay through senior year
Chicago – enter as first years, many (most?) have left by third year, some even earlier
Princeton – enter as freshman, must stay as sophomores, may opt out thereafter
Jeepers, you guys have it significantly wrong.
Chicago’s house system predates Harvard’s and Yale’s by a couple of decades. Arguably, it was in place in the mid-1890s, and practically every administration in the history of the University proposed various measures to strengthen it. However, the relatively low quality of Chicago dorms, a policy of deliberate unconcern with undergraduate quality of life until the 1980s, and the fact that half or more of Chicago undergraduates have consistently lived off campus in Hyde Park made the Chicago house system much less successful and vital than the similar systems at H & Y.
Read Dean Boyer’s monograph on the topic: https://college.uchicago.edu/sites/college.uchicago.edu/files/attachments/Boyer_OccasionalPapers_V18.pdf
BJ was built with houses in mind…in the 30s
Woodward Court, built in mid 50’s, had apartments for Resident Heads and a Resident Master.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2012/02/14/remembrance-of-a-dorms-past/
I also don’t think it’s particularly constructive comparing UChicago’s House system to the Residential College system. They’re fundamentally different because of scale.
At UChicago, your house is meant to be like an extended family. It’s between 50-100 first and second years, with a few upperclassmen. Houses are subsets within dorms, and you are probably going to end up knowing everyone in your house more closely than just knowing their names and faces.
At Harvard and Yale, the Residential Colleges are much bigger, the size of small dorms. I can’t personally speak for the social dynamics of it, but I can’t imagine that you’re going to end up knowing 300 people on a personal level just because you happen to live in a dorm with them.
Then there’s the fact that at UChicago, almost everyone moves out of the house by their third year. The house is mostly exists to help underclassmen get situated. My understanding is that moving off campus is much harder at Yale and Harvard, and most people remain closely affiliated with their college/house the whole four years.
Tradition had it when I was in B-J in the sixties that Thornton Wilder had for several years in the thirties occupied the tower apartment in Chamberlin House. That might have been true because Wilder did in fact teach at the University during the years 1930-37, during which time he wrote two of his most important works, “Our Town” and “Heaven’s My Destination”. In any event it was inspiring to think that a bona fide literary lion had once dwelled among us. I wonder if that fact or tradition lives on among today’s Chamberliners.
It’s almost unavoidable to compare the House system to, um, the House system at Harvard or the Residential College system at Yale (and Princeton, Rice, Toronto, etc.). They all had the same inspiration, which is to say the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Except for more recent converts, who may have been emulating Harvard or Yale, the creators of all of these systems were trying to adapt to a modern, American university the most attractive features of the medieval structures of the English universities. (I don’t know when Chicago migrated to the concept of small Houses within larger dorms. The original concept there was clearly one-structure/one-House, much like all the other universities.)
Even more importantly, that’s the competition. I’m certain that, as an institution, Chicago seeks – and is not so far from achieving – true parity with the very best American colleges. Each one’s housing system is somewhat unique, but there’s little question that a student admitted to several, or all or them, is going to be comparing the housing systems. We know, too, that housing is going to be a relatively important differentiator, So there’s no choice but to measure Chicago’s housing system against the systems of its rivals that have the best reputation for working well and contributing to the quality of the undergraduate experience.
It interests me that Chicago’s leadership seems intent on trying to replicate the HY model, but with significant limits. Chicago has a clear strategy of building more dorms, bringing more students back on campus, and refining its small-House/large-dorm strategy. At the same time, Chicago has not been willing to spend what its rivals spend per bed. Chicago spent $90-$100M to build the South Campus residential hall to house 800 students. Princeton spent $136M for 500 beds at Whitman College a few years before that, and Yale just spent more than $500M for 800 beds at its new residential colleges.
Boyer frequently identifies as a weakness the fact that Chicago has the highest percentage of undergraduates not living in university housing among all top private universities. Another person might try to turn that into a strength, given the unique characteristics of Hyde Park, the fantastic opportunities presented by the city of Chicago, and the current swing of the fashion pendulum towards urban living.
Well, to keep the architecture consistent at Yale and Princeton it was definitely going to cost a pretty penny. UChicago has obviously moved to a more modern architecture.
I am not so sure about the desirability of staying in residence for a full four years. I and almost all my friends moved out after either first or second year. We did this voluntarily and happily though not without trepidation. That was the culture of the place. It was one more of the adventures of youth grasping after experience. The one of us who preferred to remain in residence did so without being pushed to leave - he was an eccentric, however. The rest of us had enjoyed the communal life of the dorm, but we saw it as a rite of passage to move out - to live bravely independently; to have the more intense friendships with others only possible when you fit up and share a small apartment; to undergo the sufferings and joys of being residents of a real if blighted neighborhood with non-students all around you. As I once said on this board (to some mockery), it felt like being an honorary member of the wretched of the earth, an illusion perhaps but an educative one all the same. The University, wonderful as it is, is not the totality of life. Living south of the Midway, I loved making the daily transition from our dump of an apartment (next to a storefront church with a wonderfully colorful choir and a group of pesky neighborhood kids) to the bowered Midway with its beautiful statuesque Elms and the sight of the looming towers just beyond. There is much to be said for having something like that as part also of one’s experience of college days.
@ThankYouforHelp posted this link on Columbia’s housing situation. Made for very interesting reading, but made me scared of the housing situation at Columbia. There was a an interesting comparison with UChicago’s housing
http://features.columbiaspectator.com/eye/2015/02/18/a-house-is-not-a-home/
Then why was BJ built with 8 different houses in 1931? They even carved the house names above the doors…
I think it is and was planned to be a different system. They designed true houses rather than Oxbridge-like colleges. I think the best analog in size and function is Smith, honestly. We’re doing applicants a disservice by talking about UChicago’s House system and the Residential College system in the same breath. They shouldn’t be conflated.
Also, I think this is a really important quality of UChicago’s House System that doesn’t really exist in Residential College systems:
By “original,” I was referring to the various plans for undergraduate housing developed in the 1890s, the 1900s, and the 1920s. But BJ is not such a radical departure. From the Boyer monograph:
Notwithstanding, I agree with @HydeSnark that the Chicago model is somewhat different, and has its own virtues. Chicago doesn’t have to imitate Harvard and Yale in every respect on this. (Stanford doesn’t imitate them at all, and no one seems to mind very much. Princeton deliberately turned itself into an amalgam of Yale and what Princeton used to be.) It may not ever be capable of imitating Harvard and Yale enough to draw even on this score, so it really ought to work harder to turn its differences into selling points.
Hmm, I looked up your quote. Frankly I think W.G. Preston Jr., the university representative in question, is either mistaken or being disingenuous about the “New Plan”. Regardless of whoever they want to say they’re emulating, the system they made and built at BJ is not the system they have at Harvard or Yale. I suppose it’s possible it was scaled down because of cost and not because of intent, but the end result is the same - something actually new. He was writing to the head of Philip’s Academy - it was in his interest to play up the Ivy-ness of the system, especially if he was writing to convince students from PA to come.
Here’s what I think happened: BJ is formed similarly to one of Yale’s Colleges - neogothic halls surrounding two courtyards with a dining hall attached. I even measured it and the building is nearly the exact same size and layout as Yale’s Saybrook College. Somewhere after that was planned, however, they decided (for whatever reason) to further subdivide what would have been one Residential College into 8 more intimate Houses. The difference had to be intentional - you can’t even cross from one house into another on the inside! And once they had BJ the system stuck - further houses would continue to be less than 100 people (a limit they stick to even now), divisions within dorms rather than dorms themselves.
Which makes me wonder - did they call it the “New Plan” because it is “New” as in being wholly new or because it is “New” as in new for the University of Chicago?
Just for info – Saybrook College is somewhat dear to my heart – Harkness Quadrangle (of which Saybrook forms half) predated the creation of Yale’s residential college system by more than a decade. It was designed, and construction began, in 1917, and it opened in 1921. The residential college system was adopted in the late 20s and went into operation in the 30s. The original architect, who also designed most of Yale’s other original residential colleges, designed a substantial retrofit of the Quadrangle to create Saybrook and Branford Colleges. Neither had a master’s quarters, a dean’s office, or a dining hall originally. They opened as residential colleges in 1933.
They are not so differently designed than BJ, by the way. Saybrook, Branford, and indeed almost all of the buildings at Yale from that era, were designed around entryways – sort of vertical hallways, staircases with 2-4 rooms and a common bathroom on each landing and an exit to the outside. My understanding is that Oxbridge colleges generally have that design, too. (I haven’t been in the residential areas of Saybrook or Branford since their substantial renovation a few years ago, so I am describing them as they existed from 1933 until the mid-00s.) Each entryway in Saybrook housed 25-30 students, with some exceptions. Each entryway in Saybrook and Branford had a name and an elaborate carving on its external door with the coat of arms and other illustrative material about the namesake. In general, you had to go outside to go from one entryway to another, or to common areas. A few entryways had access to the basement, and once in the basement you could travel to other access points without going outside. (That was somewhat more common in Saybrook than in Branford.) Each freshman entryway on the Old Campus had two Freshman Counselors (RAs) living there, but there were no RAs in the College itself.
The social difference vs. BJ was that from one year to the next people changed rooms freely without regard to entryways. On the other hand, however, I spent eight semesters in Saybrook College housing with roommates, and with the exception of one semester where I was returning from a semester away, every roommate I had was someone who had lived in the same entryway with me our freshman year. That wasn’t universal, but it was hardly uncommon.