Cornell is a residential university. Since the university's earliest days, the majority of students have come to Cornell from far outside the Ithaca area and have had to find housing locally, rather than commuting to and from their family homes every day. As a result, residence on campus, although never required for everyone, has always been an important component of undergraduate life.
Andrew D. White, Cornell's first president, opposed the dormitory system of student housing, believing that students would be better supervised if they lived in private homes in town. The logistics of climbing the hill from downtown boarding houses two or three times a day in order to attend classes, however, made on-campus housing desirable for many students. Accordingly, White set forth in his 1866 Plan of Organization the expectation that faculty members would become well acquainted with students outside of class. In Cascadilla Place, the center of student life in the university's early days, faculty members and students lived together with a degree of intimacy which, in the words of Morris Bishop, was appreciated by the students more than by the faculty.
Residence on campus has been a vital part of the undergraduate experience at Cornell ever since; it has also been a controversial one, beginning with White's initial opposition to the dormitory system and continuing to the present day. At issue for the past several decades have been the quality and quantity of on-campus housing; the place of fraternities and sororities among housing options available to students; and, in recent years, the role of program houses, especially those associated with specific racial or ethnic programs. Also of great significance to many individuals and constituencies on campus has been the matter of student choice in housing assignments. This issue bears upon Cornell's long-standing tradition of freedom with responsibility, described by Carl Becker as the freedom to do what one chooses, but with responsibility for what one chooses to do.
Given its controversial nature and its significance to Cornell, on-campus housing has been one of the most exhaustively studied issues on campus. Since 1966, there have been at least 23 reports dealing with campus housing. These include the Cornell University Residence Plan (CURP Report), April 1966; Residential Colleges Committee Report (Seznec Report), 1969; Guidelines for Establishment and Operation of Residential Special Projects (Residential Program Houses), March 1973; Proposal for a Residential Learning House (Kramnick Report), March 28, 1984; the Cornell University Strategic Housing Plan (Cresap), September 1989; Report of Task Force on Freshman Housing Assignment, 1992; Latino Living Center Proposal, February 11, 1994; Strategic Planning Task Force No. 1: Educating the Leaders of Tomorrow, March 15, 1994; the Residential Communities Committee (Gerner Report), December 1995; and the Residential Communities Implementation Plan Steering Committee (RCSC) Report, September 29, 1997.
Despite widespread concern about residential housing at Cornell, however, the university has never been able to provide on-campus housing to a majority of its students. Last year Cornell housed 41 percent of its undergraduate students in on-campus housing. Harvard, by comparison, housed 97 percent of its undergraduates on campus; Princeton housed 97 percent; Stanford housed 91 percent. In fact, among 16 peer institutions, only the University of Michigan, a large public university, housed a smaller percentage of its undergraduate students on campus last year. Furthermore, the majority of Cornell students prefer to move off campus at the first opportunity, typically after the freshman year.
In addition to a shortage of on-campus housing, Cornell has suffered from a division of its undergraduate student body between North Campus and West Campus (with a third, smaller component in Collegetown). Cornell's gorges are not simply geographical features; they have come to divide the student body socially, culturally, and, to some degree, even racially. This fragmentation, characterized in detail by the RCSC report, makes it difficult for Cornell to offer a unified program to freshmen in their crucial first year and leads to wide differences in the cultural, social, and even academic environments for those new students. The housing choices made by students even before their arrival at Cornell exacerbate these differences. In an effort to live among students like themselves, many freshmen choose the noisier, more homogeneous, more fraternity- and sorority-oriented West Campus. Similarly, many freshmen choose the quieter, more diverse North Campus. Wanting comfort and familiarity is understandable, but it often limits a student's exposure to the full diversity of the freshman class and to the intellectual and cultural breadth of Cornell during the first critical year. Since many students move off campus after that first year, their exposure to the very diversity that Cornell has worked to develop remains limited for their entire undergraduate career.
Race has been a particularly divisive issue at Cornell, as it has been at many other colleges and universities. Much of the controversy concerning campus housing over the past three decades has had a racial component. As the RCSC's Residential Options Task Force points out, the issue of race goes far beyond Ujamaa, the Latino Living Center and Akwe:kon, which house about 12 percent of the approximately 1,500 under-represented minority undergraduates at Cornell. Race is more than a program house issue or a housing issue; it is an issue that emerges in classrooms, on playing fields, in service activities and in many aspects of campus life. But housing remains a center of debate about race because Cornell has several racially- or ethnically-concentrated living areas and because many students choose their freshman residence with racial or ethnic considerations in mind. The division of the campus into an overwhelmingly white West Campus and a much more diverse North Campus has become a visible sign of racial and ethnic fragmentation at Cornell.
Given the long history of controversy surrounding residential housing and the many previous reports that have appeared on the topic, I am grateful to the RCSC not only for its recommendations, but also for developing a philosophical framework and a set of goals for the undergraduate experience. I appreciate the RCSC's efforts to solicit and to respond to public comment in formulating its final report and the dedication and civility with which it has conducted its deliberations and developed its recommendations. I also want to thank the many other individuals and groups who have conferred with me about this issue, formally and informally, over the past two years. These discussions have provided a much-needed opportunity to look broadly at the undergraduate experience, and they have been central in forming my own views, which I present below.
The RCSC statement of values offers an excellent starting point for consideration of the living/learning environment at Cornell. I, too, envision an academic community in which students, faculty, and staff pursue their own development "in full recognition and acknowledgment of their membership in a learning community." Like the RCSC, I am committed to promoting an environment in which students, faculty, and staff respect one another and share values, including "a belief in the value of education, a commitment to the use of evidence and sound reasoning in the framing of arguments and stating points of view, a commitment to our founder's beliefs that education should include the traditional liberal arts and the more specialized and applied areas of study, thus integrating theory and practice." I also strongly endorse the RCSC's 10 goals for the undergraduate experience.
It is especially important, I believe, to introduce first-year students to Cornell's intellectual and cultural scope. I agree with the RCSC's call, in the Sept. 8 draft of its report, for "promoting integration across racial, ethnic, college, and class year distinctions"; however, I find regrettable the weakening of that call, in the final document, to "promoting meaningful interaction and connection across differences, such as racial, ethnic, college, and class year distinctions." Integration, particularly racial and ethnic integration, I believe to be a major goal of this university, as it is in American society generally. I recognize that some individuals believe that integration implies or even necessarily entails assimilation of minorities into the majority population and the consequent loss of their identity. It is my view, however, that all members of the university have the ability and the responsibility to contribute to the shaping of our academic community, and that Cornell should encourage them to do so.
I agree strongly with the RCSC's call for addressing differences between North Campus and West Campus. These include, as the committee notes, differences in demographics, in facilities, in the relationship to fraternities and sororities, in housing density, in the ability of students to study in the residence halls, and in the campus climate.
The RCSC has put forward 22 specific recommendations to address these and other residential community issues. These recommendations, while helpful, are limited in scope and incremental in approach. I believe major changes are needed. While I support the RCSC's recommendations for upgrading residence halls in order to make them more convenient for students and more conducive to studying, I do not think that they go far enough in fulfilling the trustees' principle that "the university has an important interest in assuring that freshmen have the widest possible exposure to the full range of intellectual, cultural, and social opportunities available at Cornell." The freshman residential experience is critical to new students' introduction to Cornell's academic community, and to their learning to live independently and with other students from different backgrounds. I recognize that freedom with responsibility is a value long cherished at Cornell, and that there is strong student sentiment to retain choice, particularly for freshmen, in the selection of residential housing. However, "freshman choice" alone neither addresses the problem of the self-segregation of new students into West Campus and North Campus made possible by our current housing options, nor does it confront the need for effective programming for all freshmen.
In formulating a plan of action for residential housing, I am committed to preserving, to the extent feasible, the freedom of choice that has been and continues to be important to students at Cornell, while also moving decisively to provide a unifying educational experience that will introduce new students to the breadth of the intellectual environment at Cornell and that will enable students to experience the full diversity of the freshman class.
Accordingly, I will present to the Board of Trustees at its October meeting the following plan of action:
1. All freshmen will, as soon as possible, be housed on North Campus. West Campus and Collegetown will be reserved for sophomores, juniors, seniors and a few graduate students.
Housing all freshmen on North Campus will allow Cornell to improve the effectiveness of programming for the entire freshman class; will provide an opportunity for each freshman class to develop its own sense of identity; and will enable the class to take full advantage of its diversity, which, as the RCSC's Residential Options Task Force noted, is religious, cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, academic and extracurricular as well as racial and ethnic.
Programming on North Campus should emphasize the introduction of freshmen to academic life at Cornell, particularly through faculty mentoring, as proposed in the RCSC's sixth and ninth recommendations. Programming opportunities include expansion of the faculty-in-residence and faculty fellows programs, freshman writing seminars taught on North Campus, and advising and lecturing in residence halls.
With a substantial number of resident advisers present throughout all freshman housing on North Campus, this plan remains consistent with the principle articulated by the board of trustees that upperclass students should be available to freshmen for mentoring and building a sense of continuity.
2. Since there is not enough housing on the campus as a whole to fulfill the trustees' principle of guaranteeing on-campus residences for all freshmen, sophomores and transfers who desire it, I will recommend to the board of trustees that Cornell construct new residential space.
I will further recommend to the board that we construct that new residential space on North Campus, which currently does not have enough beds to accommodate all freshmen.
3. We will improve the living and learning environment on West Campus by making it architecturally and programmatically attractive to upperclass students.
We will make significant architectural improvements to reduce density, as recommended by the RCSC, and to respond to the findings of the student demand survey conducted by the Randolph Group, which the RCSC commissioned to inform its work. Changes will include increasing the number of single rooms, ensuring more privacy and quiet study space for residents, providing kitchen facilities that would allow more independent meal preparation, and increasing the availability of common living areas.
We will enable students to select blocks of rooms together, and we will provide quality programming designed to meet the interests and needs of upperclass students, such as programs based on the residential college model used effectively at a number of other universities.
4. In order to accommodate all freshmen on North Campus and to provide them with a high-quality first-year experience, every undergraduate residence hall on North Campus must have a substantial proportion of freshmen living in it.
If the Office of Campus Life and the faculty and students in a program house currently on North Campus wish to focus programming on sophomores, juniors and seniors, we will enable the program house to move to West Campus as expeditiously as possible and will assist it in finding attractive space there. Freshmen may affiliate with such a program house, but may not live in it.
If Campus Life and the faculty and students in a program house wish to have that program remain on North Campus, it may remain there and have freshmen as well as upperclass students in the program, with freshmen representing between a quarter and a half of its student population. North Campus program houses will be expected to participate in the programming described above in order to provide a broad introduction to Cornell for their members. They will also participate in cross-residential programming of the kind called for by the RCSC. If a program house currently in its own separate building does not fill all its beds, the Office of Campus Life may fill those spaces by assigning freshmen to the building.
There are currently three program houses on West Campus. If, for programmatic purposes, the Office of Campus Life and the faculty and students in a program house wish to retain freshman residents, we will enable the program house to move to North Campus, so long as it meets the guidelines for freshman representation in North Campus program houses. The size of those program houses moving to North Campus will be determined on a space-available basis. Program houses may remain on West Campus, but in that case without freshman residents.
This plan continues Cornell's current range of housing options, including traditional dormitories, program houses, cooperatives, fraternities and sororities and off-campus housing.
5. I am committed to the full implementation of the Fraternity and Sorority System Strategic Plan developed by fraternity and sorority members together with alumni, faculty and staff and released in January 1997.
The plan states that the Greek system at Cornell exists "to cultivate the intellectual, social, and ethical development of our members in an environment of freedom with responsibility," and it calls for major changes in the Greek houses and in the way they relate to the academic community. These changes include having a faculty fellow associated with each chapter, co-sponsoring events with other student groups, and encouraging the development of appropriate social behavior and actions that are respectful of the individual, the Greek system and the Cornell community.
I believe that implementation of this plan will greatly increase the value of fraternities and sororities to their members and to the university. I am committed to implementing the plan in its entirety, including the use of serious sanctions in instances of non-compliance.
6. We expect to implement this residential housing initiative between now and the year 2001, when the new residential housing space should become available.
Over the next three years, we will phase in those parts of the plan that do not require the completion of new residential housing space. We will begin to enroll more freshmen on North Campus each year. We will also begin to increase the options for upperclass students on West Campus. As soon as possible, Collegetown residences will be reserved for sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Recognizing that implementation of the new residential housing plan will require a major change for the campus as a whole, we will allow program houses to adapt to these new expectations over the course of this three-year period. We will approve no new program houses during the transition period. We will closely monitor the effects of the changes and use our findings to reevaluate the guidelines and criteria for program houses, as recommended in the RCSC's Recommendation No. 22.
7. Resources necessary to implement this comprehensive plan will not be drawn from other sectors of the university.
The Office of Campus Life has always operated under its own separate enterprise budget. It will continue to do so under this new plan through operating revenues and by securing resources from outside the university.
Summary
In my inaugural address, I called upon all Cornellians to explore and measure, with honesty and courage, the gulfs that separate students from each other and from the full intellectual and cultural richness of the university. The RCSC, its associated task forces, and the Residential Communities Committee, which completed its report in December 1995, have contributed significantly to that exploration and assessment.
The time has now come to bridge the chasms. With the policy statement on residential communities approved by the board of trustees in May 1996 as the foundation, and with the efforts of the above committees serving as planks for the larger structure, this plan of action addresses Cornell's divisions directly, preserves the university's long-standing tradition of freedom with responsibility, and takes decisive action to ensure that students, from their very first year on campus, are exposed to the full range of intellectual and cultural opportunities inherent in the university. When fully implemented, the plan will link the living and learning environments of the university and will strengthen the ability of all Cornellians to contribute to and benefit from the intellectual community of which each of us is a part.
Hunter R. Rawlings III
Oct. 8, 1997