The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 39, No. 2 & Volume 40, No. 1 - 106

S. Stewart Gordon

and personality development of students, but
there is no way to get around the fact that in
a college the curriculum and teaching are the
raison d’être and the basic elements around
which individual personalities and communal
relationships develop.1
Other such colleges, whose initiators see
self-development as a primary goal, define
themselves more in terms of affective ends of
education. At any rate, one of the basic aims
in all of these endeavors has been to offer the
curriculum in a setting where the students
would relate to each other. Jencks and Riesman
pointed out more than ten years ago: “students
are discouraged from assimilating the ideas
and attitudes they meet in the classroom by
their inability to share and explore them immediately with friends.”2 The same notion of
communicating intellectual interests appears
in an article by Theodore Newcomb:
In the typical large university it is hardly
more than a chance occurrence if a set
of students whose personal relationships
are close find themselves simultaneously
excited by the same lecture, the same
book, or the same seminar, with resulting
reverberations in their peer-group life, so that
they re-enforce and sustain one another’s
excitement. Such outcomes are predictably
more likely if arrangements concerning college
(or subcollege) membership, living group
membership, and classroom experience are so
dovetailed that groups of individuals who are
important to one another come to share many
interests, including intellectual ones.3
Educators often seize on the idea of interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary instruction
as appropriate for the curriculum of such a
college. Their proposals range from currently
popular subjects such as urban affairs or the

106

environment to a fine arts emphasis, such as at
Risley Residential College at Cornell. However,
the idea of an interdisciplinary curriculum,
warns Warren Bryan Martin, appears threatening to discipline-oriented faculty, and hence
contributes to the failure of these sub-colleges.
Nevertheless, Martin argues, such programs
help provide the advantages of smallness in
large universities.4
These advantages, I gather from conversations with residence staff and faculty members
associated with residential colleges and from
the literature, stem from the opportunities
offered to students that foster self-development, self-awareness, and learning to deal with
others. In studies by Katz and others of what
students at Berkeley and Stanford valued most,
love, affection, and developing a personal identity led the list.5 Affective gains, then, appear
among the stated purposes of most sub-colleges. Kresge College, a new component of the
University of California at Santa Cruz, is initiating “kin” groups of about 25 students each.
Each kin group is to be (1) a social unit, (2) a
group to explore interpersonal relationships,
(3) an academic unit—a discussion seminar
in a core course, and (4) an advising unit with
a faculty member assigned to each group. A
combination of affective and cognitive learning is the ideal of the new residential colleges.
Although students in residential colleges
do not earn appreciably higher grades, after
ability is allowed for, they identify themselves
as having more intellectual interests than their
peers, and they tend to stay in the university
longer than other students. At the University
of Michigan’s Residential College, it was estimated that “after two and one-half years, about
20 percent of those who had entered in the

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

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