Related story: Students and faculty reflect on the benefits of the GG&S book project
The opening of the new North Campus residential complex is history. The ribbons have been cut, the doors opened. The rooms and hallways are already filled with freshmen hurrying to catch up, get ahead and also have some fun.
The transformation to a new kind of undergraduate experience has begun, one aimed at linking the living and learning environment of students -- of bringing a sharper intellectual focus to their lives both inside and outside the classroom. Freshmen in the class of 2005 share a common living and learning environment, one that is also designed to bring them together as a group, to help them forge a sense of class identity and to ease the transition to university life.
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| Rick Bogel, right, professor of English, speaks with, from left, freshmen Liz Shuford and Laura Karlin during their Knight First-Year Writing Seminar class in 140 Court Hall, Sept. 10. Charles Harrington/University Photography |
Sounds good. And so far, so good, or so it seems. But the question remains, how will we know whether the transformation from vision to reality has been successful? How do university administrators intend to measure the impact of the first half of the residential initiative, the creation of a community of freshmen on North Campus?
In two ways, said Provost Biddy Martin: the old-fashioned method, by the seat of the pants, and also with the help of several traditional surveys.
The Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies book project provided the earliest seat-of-the-pants results, Martin said. And, she added, by most measures it was a success.
All freshmen were required to read the book by Jared Diamond over the summer. Then, as part of freshman orientation, they attended a faculty-panel discussion in Barton Hall and small discussion groups facilitated by faculty and upper-class students. The book also will be the basis for assignments for some seminars in the John S. Knight Writing Program, and next week, author Diamond will visit campus.
"The book project created a lot of focused intellectual discussion on campus, and it will be a touchstone for in-class and out-of-class discussion over the course of time," Martin said. "As such it is intellectually, academically and even socially useful. That's the sort of focus to students' social and residential lives that we are looking for, an intellectual focus."
Martin said she is just now getting reactions from faculty and facilitators about the book project. (See the sampling of e-mail responses, above.) In addition, in coming weeks an electronic message will seek reactions from students.
Facilitators were overwhelmingly positive about the small group seminars with students, Martin said. And while most of the students in her seminar group said they thoroughly enjoyed the panel discussion, some found the panelists' comments less interesting than they had hoped.
With 4,000 packed into Barton, some also found it difficult to see and hear the panelists and their fellow students. But others said they were pleased that their peers got up in large numbers and asked sophisticated questions.
"There are clearly things we will have to do differently next year," Martin said. She said they are considering using video screens and involving students on the panel.
"But we had 4,000 people in a room discussing an intellectual topic. I found it extremely exciting, and other people told me they actually found it very moving. At the very least, we succeeded in creating a great community of discussion that will be ongoing on this campus for some time."
Further, Martin said she found the 15 students in her group engaged and very well prepared. "It was impressive how well-prepared they were. They were able to reproduce the arguments of the book and discuss the merits of the arguments and related topics. In addition, many students have said they want to participate next year as student facilitators. I consider that a success by any measure."
Beyond the intellectual focus provided by the book project, Martin anticipates other outcomes from the North Campus residential initiatives.
"I think this class will have an opportunity that other entering classes have not had, of developing a sense of shared identity. By sharing the living and learning environment, it will make a difference not only in what first-year students feel about Cornell, but also what they feel about themselves and about their lives as students and scholars.
"Those students looking for a richer out-of-class experience will find that Cornell is a place where they can find that. In addition to being a place to have fun and where you can fit in, Cornell will begin to seem an option to those students who see themselves as having the strongest interest in pursuing the life of a scholar. It is my hope that the experience of broadening their intellectual horizons will become part of and not separate from their life as university students."
The very geography of North Campus is helping to forge a sense of community, Martin said. With living spaces, classrooms, study lounges, dining halls and even small shops all present in a relatively smaller, more easily negotiated space, "it will help students coming into a relatively large university feel they have a small home, within the larger whole, that will be familiar to them," she said.
And there are already seat-of-the-pants signs that these freshman students on North Campus are feeling a sense of community and teamwork, Martin said. "By the end of Orientation, somehow, I have no idea how, Court students had managed to get up to the roof of the Court Building and place a sign there that read, 'Mews Sucks, Court Rocks.' I consider that a sign of how inventive and creative they are about generally finding ways of accomplishing difficult tasks. It shows real teamwork."
And there are other, more standard measures, said Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academic services. These include:
"Basically, these surveys measure the satisfaction and educational engagement of students," Murphy said. "We're looking at these data to see what changes, if any, we can track. Can we see cause and effect? That will be difficult to determine, but at least we are interested in what changes occur over a period of four years."
Murphy said the administration has not yet committed to a specific written evaluation on the new North Campus programming, beyond the reading program, as they have been so focused on ensuring that the new facilities were ready to open on time. But that's in the works.
Meanwhile, she said, another informal way of measuring the success of the new project "perhaps can be inferred from whether we see increased participation in class activities and in the class council."
She also had a seat-of-the-pants reaction:
"There's a different feeling on North Campus because of the site and the facilities, which is all we had hoped it would be, but it seems to have occurred. North Campus no longer feels like a dark and distant space. It's very vibrant, very well lit and so it's a very exciting place. It feels connected. Some people call it a community. Some people call it my village, my place. It just shows you what a site design can do to transform a space. With the new programming, it really works."
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