The Residential College…Four years Later
(Editor's Note: Michigan's Residential College, called by some the first Residential College in the nation that truly restructures undergraduate academic life, is now jour years old. The following article on the thinking behind the unit, its experience and its success was written at the request of the Alumnus by Ellis A. Wunsch, chairman of the Residential College's literature program and an associate director of the unit.
Dr. Wunsch holds the bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees from the U-M. In 1969, he was the recipient of the Class of 1923's annual Distinguished Teaching Award. Director of the Residential College is James H. Robertson.)
"The undergraduate is the orphan of the American university." So, with his flair for overdrawn analogy, today's liberal arts student describes his place at the feasting board of higher education — below the salt or, again, as he would put it, standing at the back door of the kitchen.
Despite the best intentions" and the high standards of better days to guide them, universities are guilty— and they know it — of neglecting the undergraduate student. The causes lie in the calculus of academic cost accounting in the face of glutting enrollments, but whatever the causes, the results in human and educational quality arc lamentable. A simple comparison may get to the heart of the matter better than pages of educationist jargon.
Professor Typical teaches two courses a semester at a large university of the reader's choice. In one course he meets sixteen graduate students in seminar. In his other course, assisted by a squad of graduate-student readers or section leaders, he lectures to, and administers the work of, 600 undergraduate students.
In his graduate course he comes to know his students intimately. The class is small, but more importantly he spends an hour every week or two with each student, meeting in his office, over coffee, occasionally at his home. They talk about the work of the course — research, presentation of oral reports to the seminar, tightening up long papers, and the like. But consultations also move further afield into broadly professional problems: discussions of the grad's teaching in other courses, the merits of this or that job offer. Sometimes the talk takes a personal turn — the student has financial, marital, psychological strains— and the professor, who has been through it all as a grad student himself, can be a real help. In short, Professor Typical functions here often as an older and more experienced friend and an exemplar — if only as a survivor — of where the process of graduate schooling leads. Importantly here too, student, instructor, educational process, and reality (the grad's career) are tightly interrelated in a human and constructive pattern.
In his other course our hypothetical professor finds that, apart from his lectures (which could just about as well be filmed and viewed for several years on closed-circuit TV), he is administering an impersonal and wholesale distribution of intellectual commodities often unrelated to the felt needs of his 600 undergraduates. Yes, he will see some of them in his office: those protesting a grade, wangling a late drop, petitioning for an incomplete. And thus with undergraduates Professor Typical, however unwillingly, becomes Justice Shallow. Everyone loses.
In the early sixties before the vignette above had come to characterize most days in most universities, a concerned number of faculty and staff of the Literary College concluded that the undergraduate deserved a better fate. Three years of planning for a new kind of undergraduate college followed, during which a faculty committee of volunteers bag-lunched two hours a week, planning an ideal context for undergraduate living and education.
The result was the University of Michigan's Residential College which opened to its initial freshman class in the fall of 1967 in East Quadrangle, a men's dorm bounded by Church, Hill, East U. and Willard Sts. The location was to be a temporary one, but as the infant College began to find its needs and its identity, plans to build a campus north of the river adjoining the Huron Towers were scrapped. Physical proximity to the Lit School proved to be natural, handy, and indeed, essential.
There were good reasons for this and they are summed up in what could be called "collegiate federalism." The new College was established, and has remained in close association, in virtual interrelation, with its parent college, Literature, Science, and the Arts. The majority of its faculty are members of the faculty of LS&A. Its students enjoy a dual citizenship that allows them to elect courses and concentration programs in either college; their degree is conferred by LS&A with the understanding that the Residential College student pursues a different but comparable program. For purposes of some faculty appointments, the new College is like a department of the parent. For purposes of governance, curriculum development and administration it is, or hopefully soon will be, a full-fledged college directly responsible only to the Dean of LS&A.
For these and other elements in its federated relationship, the new school needed to be near its parent college. And so it was decided in the fall of '67 to remain in East Quadrangle. With Regental approval the plant was converted into a self-contained liberal arts college — classrooms, studies, a language lab, and faculty and administrative offices were worked from old space. A theater-lecture hall seating 290 was built from scratch. The small but well-stocked Benzinger Library came with the plant.
As for living arrangements, it was agreed that freshmen and sophomores should reside in the Quad. Fortunately, the complex already contained several dozen apartments, and more were worked from old doubles and triples to provide housing in the College for the third or so of the upperclassmen who might wish to remain in full residence. As it now stands, the College structure houses its faculty and about 750 of its eventual enrollment of 900 students.
Thus the University created from old, almost surplus, facilities (dormitories are increasingly non grata) a small, experimental liberal arts college in the midst of its central campus.
But to return to the thematic concern with the undergraduate's lot, one naturally asks how all this is working out for the young adult who lives and studies in a "created" community
The energizing values of this academic village can be caught in several large words: intellect and creativity, initiative and self-reliance, trust and mutual accountability, common expectations and individual freedom, but above all personal, human naturalism. Some of these qualities begin to grow in the classroom, but most must be lived into, and small scale gives the whole process a chance to work.
Faculty and students have a direct impact on one another. Most classes are small and in in-formal settings; student response is easier under these conditions. Classroom discussions frequently spill over the fifty-minute hour, some even beyond the four-month term; several seminars of last fall continued to meet, read, and discuss throughout the winter term without credit or compensation. Faculty and students eat together, casually in the dining rooms and coffeehouse, more purposefully at foreign language tables or language coffee hours. Far more importantly, however, faculty and students work, and even play, together. Theatrical productions, for example, usually have mixed casts. But more extensively a fusion of generations and roles occurs in the governing of the College. All committees and boards seat both student and faculty members, and ultimate decision making is lodged in a representative assembly composed equally of these two estates in the College. Unlike the typical student council with token jurisdiction, the Representative Assembly decides all questions coming to it from its committees and constituents, subject only to the veto power of the Director of the College, Associate Dean James H. Robertson. To date, his veto has not needed to be invoked.
From the undergraduate's point of view the College appears to be succeeding. He finds in it a home and an academic base. The world of entertainment and art that comes to Ann Arbor and the extra-curricular life of a large and exciting university lies open to him. The College has more than its share of leaders in main-campus politics, Daily editors, Hopwood winners, and it contributes to other activities, musicians, dancers, athletes, actors, and artists. Academically, the RC student takes most of his courses in his College during the first year. Increasingly, he branches out into more course work in LS&A and other units as he moves through his four years. The College itself offers several concentration programs, which are interdisciplinary, or in other respects different from what is available in LS&A. These include thus far programs in urban studies, comparative literature, history of ideas, drama, and psychology. The student may further work out an approved independent concentration wherein some custom-made focus of inquiry is developed in conjunction with one or more faculty sponsors. This year 55% of the upperclassmen were in RC concentrations. In a typically isolated and fully autonomous liberal arts college, students simply do not have a great range of concentrations open to them. Mounting specialized curricula in 20 to 30 liberal disciplines is not practicable. Thus again the RC undergraduate has the best of two possible worlds: he can live in a small, excellent college but may study anthropology, astronomy, classical, near and far eastern languages and cultures, history of art, and other relatively esoteric or small disciplines in his parent unit of LS&A.
At the same time it would be unwise to conclude that the concentration options in the RC are unnecessary. A full four-year experience is ideal. The fewer than half of the RC upperclassmen who are majoring in LS&A take many of their peer's concentration courses as junior and senior electives and cognates and thus keep a hand in the academic side of the community. Faculty morale remains high because they teach the full range of undergrad courses in their respective disciplines and because they see and know students in and out of class over a four-year span. Then too — as a social community — the College needs the ideas, experience, and seasoning of its upperclassmen.
The notion of studying — and living — the liberal arts during four years of interaction with faculty and fellow students was also designed to break down the artificial barrier between classroom and real world. But most faculty are at least a half-generation older than students and live their private lives off campus. To fill this gap qualified graduate students and upperclassmen were appointed Resident Fellows to live in with the undergraduates, principally as exemplars of what you do with a liberal education. In their counseling, bull-sessioning, and work in the activities of the College, the RF's are supposed to be exemplars of how the trained intellect, ethical consciousness, and developed sensibility respond to problems in and out of the classroom. This, of course, is one of those intangibles that one cannot validly measure, but it seems to be working.
Another innovation undertaken by the new College is pass/fail grading with a prose evaluation. Here the written evaluation makes this form of grading (it is only used in small classes) a quite different mechanism from the gross satisfactory/unsatisfactory categories of most pass/fail systems. The RC instructor, knowing the student as a student, writes an analysis of his accomplishments and skills in the course. These evaluations become a second sheet of the student's transcript. Far from being, then, an evasion of judgment, they become instruments that can tell a graduate or professional school the kind of things it wishes it could get from letters of recommendation, i.e. candid, detailed reports of the student's success in specific courses. Controversial and widely misunderstood, the evaluation experiment of the RC seems to have been accepted if the placement of its first graduates this spring is evidence. They have entered first-line medical, law, and graduate schools without difficulty.
A final consideration is the cost of this experimental college within a college. It has cost more. Still, as the RC moves toward its more or less stable and efficient population level, many expenses of the first years are coming into line. More interestingly, the very experimental mandate of the College has opened the door to educational reforms which are, incidentally, of low cost. One conviction of the original planning committee was the encouragement of independent study. A student who wished to pursue an academic interest not available in conventional courses could draw up a prospectus and bibliography, get it approved by a faculty person in a related discipline, and work alone for a quarter of his time during a semester. The faculty commitment is less than to a "tutorial" and accordingly is not compensated. At the current time the notion of expanding independent study into an off-campus semester in approved field. In the ceramics studio work or self-education is being implemented by the College. Finally, in a number of RC programs outstanding students in a given course are invited as seniors to serve as section leaders in the course. Their work is supervised, and they are given credit for a "Practicum in College Teaching" but not money. These and future educational innovations have the secondary merit of bringing costs to tolerable levels. How significantly, of course, remains to be seen.
Which leads to the big question: Has the experiment succeeded The real results, of course, are qualitative intangibles that will lodge in the future lives of RC graduates. Some things we know already which at this writing have to be taken on faith. First, the undergraduate has been recognized at the University of Michigan. Our students know something quite unusual has happened to them. Most LS&A students and faculty appear to take pride in a University that has shown, even on an experimental scale, that it cares and is doing something about totally restructuring undergraduate education. (LS&A has, of course, been implementing other significant undergraduate reforms or its own devising suited to its size and its structure.) Second, the RC faculty in their professional and personal lives are highly committed to the College. Third, a surprising amount of national attention and interest is evidenced in the experiment. The droves of visitors from other large universities at times almost encumbers operations. Apparently, two aspects of the College are relatively rare among residential colleges across the country. One of these is the intricate and carefully balanced collegiate federalism mentioned above. Most residential colleges are simply freshman living arrangements with a few in-house counselors. A few have some underclassmen general courses of their own; seldom do they have faculty of their own. The other aspect, closely related to the first, is the existence of concentration programs fully implemented and built into the curricular life of the College. These secure a solid intellectual, aesthetic, social community where the ideals of personal instruction, growing self-reliance, and the interpenetration of classroom and real world have a chance to happen throughout the undergrad life as an undergrad.
And so the nation is watching the University of Michigan's apparently successful experiment. Perhaps the magic formula is as simple as this: it was designed by people who thoroughly understood colleges as places to live in and as challenges to the inquiring spirit. I am speaking of those bag-lunching faculty planners in the early sixties whose artifact was made flexible enough and well enough that it could be creatively expanded by the staff, faculty, and especially the students who one day came to work and live in it.
The Michigan Alumnus
June 1971, Page 20
