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AGE HAS ITS BENEFITS: Branner
(above), Lagunita, Roble and Toyon would house
only upperclassmen, in private sleeping spaces.
News Service |
when he enrolled at Stanford,
Brendan Selby hoped to live in an all-freshman dorm.
“You want to be around people who are going to
Full Moon on the Quad for the first time, who are going
through [Introduction to the Humanities and the program
in writing and rhetoric] with you,” he says. “Those
are the things that form the basis of friendships.”
But Selby, ’07, was one of the approximately 300
freshmen each year whose requests for all-frosh housing
can’t be accommodated. He had fun in his four-class
dorm and made friends—“everyone enjoys freshman
year”—but believes he would have hung out
with a bigger, more diverse group of people in an all-frosh
dorm.
To add insult to injury, Selby was assigned to Lagunita
Court, which has the smallest freshman doubles on campus.
Vice provost for undergraduate education and professor
of materials science and engineering John Bravman says,
“Every year on move-in day, I just cringe when
we drive around with the president and we have to stop
at Lag.”
Bravman, ’79, MS ’81, PhD ’85, is
leading efforts to ensure that no one from the Class
of 2014 will have to live in the “Lagunita minidoubles.”
He has outlined a plan to improve undergraduate housing
over the next two to six years that includes the following
key elements:
“Unstuffing” the dorms.
This will reduce the number of students per room in
several residences and restore study and seminar rooms
that have been converted to sleeping spaces. Branner,
Toyon, Roble and Lagunita would house only sophomores,
juniors and seniors; and room occupancy would be reduced
in each. The two-room triples in Branner and Toyon and
the three-room quads in Roble would be converted to
doubles, and Lagunita doubles would becomes singles.
Because the University does not want freshmen isolated
in singles, the proposal suggests moving Ujamaa, the
black/African-American cross-cultural theme house, from
Lagunita to Loro and Mirlo, two adjacent dormitories
in Florence Moore Hall.
The unstuffing plan requires approximately 650 more
spaces for undergraduates than are currently available.
Construction of the Munger Graduate Residences will
free up the 360 spaces in Crothers and Crothers Memorial
for undergraduate use. To accommodate the remaining
students, Stanford plans to construct a combination
of dorms and Row houses, including a fourth dorm in
the Manzanita Park area and an environmentally friendly
Row house.
Housing most freshmen in all-frosh houses.
All dorms in Wilbur, Stern and Florence Moore halls
would be all-frosh except for the four-class cross-cultural
theme houses Casa Zapata, Okada and, if it moves to
FloMo, Ujamaa. Freshmen also would live in Freshman-Sophomore
College in Sterling Quadrangle, in the cross-cultural
theme house Muwekma-Tah-Ruk on the Row, and in at least
one additional four-class dorm.
Providing housing of “generally escalating
quality” throughout students’ undergraduate
careers and simplifying the Draw, Stanford’s
housing assignment system for upperclassmen.
“Pretty much everyone recognizes the need for
fundamental changes in housing,” says Selby, who
covers the subject for the Stanford Daily.
“I would love to be going to Stanford after the
changes are made.”
Selby says that a “silent majority” of students
supports the changes. Criticism, Bravman says, has taken
two main forms: support for four-class living and objections
to moving Ujamaa.
Sophomore Andy Leifer has mixed feelings. He likes the
idea that students will have access to better housing
over time, but is thankful he lived in a four-class
dorm as a freshman. “I really thrive on listening
to older people,” he says. “They’ve
done exactly what I’m doing and have good advice.”
Still, he says, “I know Bravman wants to go all-frosh,
and I tend to trust what he has to say.”
“Our experience with four-class dorms is that
for every student who finds mentorship from upperclassmen,
there’s probably more than one who’s disappointed,”
Bravman says. “At a minimum, we want to meet the
demand for all-frosh housing. We probably won’t
meet the demand for four-class, but we’re erring
badly on one side; we may have to err a little bit on
the other side. We also have some survey data from our
students that on average—and students are individuals,
not averages—the freshman-year experience is rated
more highly in all-freshman dorms. And this is not unique
to Stanford.”
Proponents of all-frosh housing praise the social opportunities
it provides. Living in all-frosh Otero “was definitely
the highlight of my Stanford career so far,” says
junior Shirin Sharif. “There was so much energy.
We had 87 friends that were like one big family.”
It’s also easy to make friends in Ujamaa, says
sophomore Macarrin Morton, who has lived there for two
years. He speaks fondly of residents gathering in Uj’s
hallways and talking until 4 a.m. And that’s one
reason why Morton doesn’t want the cross-cultural
theme house to move to FloMo. “Ujamaa is noted
for having wide hallways,” he says. In Loro and
Mirlo, “the hallways are smaller. There’s
no central staircase. There’s too much space between
the dorms to even think that you can begin to unify
the community.”
Ujamaa residents and members of the Black Student Union
and other organizations for students of color have said
that if Uj is to move, it should move somewhere better.
“The trick is defining what better is,”
Morton concedes. Administrators have agreed to convert
a number of the one-room doubles in Loro and Mirlo to
singles for upperclassmen, since that is part of the
appeal of Ujamaa’s current location, and have
extended the offer to Casa Zapata and Okada. Some are
happy with that. Others think the dialogue needs to
continue.
“I think we can build a world-class facility in
FloMo for Ujamaa,” Bravman says. He has emphasized
in his proposal and elsewhere that the University believes
in the importance and value of cross-cultural theme
dorms. Indeed, he adds, the housing proposal is designed
to set the stage for improvements in residential education,
including more and stronger academic theme programs
of all types. “I really see this, the president
sees this, the provost sees this as the capstone to
a decade of innovation in undergraduate education,”
he says. “Now, we need academic and faculty input
and guidance at a level we haven’t had in a long
time through the residential education system.”
Bravman imagines an international studies theme dorm
in Crothers or Cro Mem, near the Stanford Institute
for International Studies, as SIIS director Coit Blacker
already has suggested. Or a performing arts program
that, with additional space and funding, expands upon
the “great work” that resident fellows Jonathan
Berger, DMA ’82, an associate professor of music,
and Talya Berger, MA ’81, a music lecturer, have
done in Kimball Hall. “That’s what we want
to do,” Bravman says, “as broadly as we
can across the campus.”
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