'U' should not mandate living-learning

By Jack Schillaci
Daily Editorial Page Writer

Residence halls play an integral role in first-year students' lives. In late August, students pack all of their earthly belongings into tiny rooms that they share with someone they've never met.

Part of the residence hall life equation is the living-learning programs. There are already numerous programs on campus, offering students the opportunity to live with people who have similar interests . The programs are also presently voluntary. Students who apply to the Residential College know what they are getting into.

But Vice President for Student Affairs Maureen Hartford wants to make the programs mandatory or at least the norm - possibly limiting students' University experience.

Hartford wants to make sure that first-year students spend lots of time with the people they live with. In 1996, she assembled a task force to study options for expanding living-learning programs. Her goal is a campus where every student will participate in a living-learning program. Just think, newly acquainted neighbors will live together, eat together, go to class together - they will become each other's shadows.

The idea is that the University learning environment will extend from the classroom into the residence halls and everyone will become one big happy maize-and-blue family.

And 15 years later, after afflicted students finish extensive psychotherapy, the living-learners will realize that Hartford did not mean to drive them insane by surrounding them with the same people constantly and stifling their opportunities to escape their pre-defined niche.

She was just woefully misguided in determining what was best for students - forgetting that they are probably the ones to determine their own best interests.

Hartford and the 17-member task force's ideas were misguided. By limiting students' access to the wealth of unique and educational opportunities that exist on campus, living-learning programs do them a disservice. First-year students limited to people that have nearly identical interests may not have the chance to experience the many different backgrounds, beliefs and ideas that exist among University students. The University is more than going to class and living in the dorms - a fact the living-learning programs could prevent students from learning.

Another problem the living-learning programs forget to take into account is the likelihood that students will change both the academic and personal focuses of their lives. College is about learning what matters to individual students.

Most first-year students are not positive about concentration decisions when they apply to the University. Just because a student enters the University as an English concentrator doesn't mean he or she won't be graduating with a business degree.

If students are trapped in a science-oriented living-learning program and half way through the year decide to study art history, they may be trapped in the program unable to explore their new interest.

Granted, college is a sheltered environment. But the living-learning programs can turn that sheltering into asphyxiation.

The University should stop expanding the living-learning programs and allow students to develop without needless and unwanted administrative overbearance.

09-03-97