The U-M Residential College,
Now 10, Offers Something
Different, All Right,
But Will It Endure
By Claudia Capos
To the casual observer, the sprawling brick dormitory at the corner of East University and Willard St. appears almost indistinguishable from many of the other residence halls and classroom buildings that make up the University of Michigan campus.
The weathered red bricks of the block-square complex are covered, here and there, with thick growths of vines which turn reddish-gold in the fall, lending a sort of "Ivy League" ambience to the setting. Bicycles chained to every tree on the lawn and every rack on the side-walk confirm the presence of a casual collegiate population. Tradition seemingly seeps from every crevice.
But that's where the deception lies, for the University of Michigan's Residential College in East Quadrangle is anything but traditional.
Since opening its doors 10 years ago, the Residential College (RC, for short) has served as a unique experiment in higher education. Its purpose is to offer students a small, liberal arts college education within the context of a huge, multi-disciplinary university.
The 650 undergraduates enrolled in the RC enjoy small classes, close contacts with faculty members and the opportunity to control to a great extent their combined educational and social environment. The RC has also served as a testing grounds for new teaching methods and curricula. Because of its experimental nature, it has consistently attracted a more socially and politically involved core of students and faculty.
What’s most remarkable about Michigan's Residential College, however, is the fact that it still simply exists.
The declining interest in traditional liberal arts education, coupled with the rising emphasis on professional training and career preparation has forced some universities to close their residential colleges. Others have quietly dropped the liberal arts orientation and shifted their focus to a specialized educational area such as science or law.
Michigan's Residential College has suffered its share of problems as well, the most recent being a noticeable decline in enrollment. Instead of turning away an over flow of applicants as in the past, the RC must now actively recruit students to maintain its admission figures.
Despite its difficulties, the U-M Residential College has managed to survive its first decade.
The question is — will it survive its second
Surprisingly, had everything gone according to plan, the Residential College today might well occupy its own multi-million dollar, self-sufficient complex. The U-M faculty committee which formulated the proposal for the RC in 1966 envisioned an elaborate campus on a 50-acre tract of land stretching along Fuller Rd. between North and Central Campus. Plans called for a library, classrooms, laboratories, offices and residence halls to accommodate 1,200 students. Although it was never designated as an honors college (the faculty preferred a representative selection of students), the RC was intended to mold students' living and learning environments into one in order to sustain "the ideal of a community of scholars."
"Its goal was simply to excite kids intellectually," recalls Professor Emeritus Ted Newcomb, who says he was attracted to the project by his interest in innovative learning situations. This was during the time, the mid-1960s, when educators and students were beginning to search for alternatives to the mass education offered at the nation's state supported colleges and universities.
"It all had to do with the liveliness of the times spawned by the Vietnam War and the draft and the revolt of youth against puritanical standards and impersonality," explains Newcomb, indicating that as many as 30 or 40 other universities initiated similar experimental colleges about the time Michigan did.
Ironically, it was that very liveliness of political and social thought engendered by the RC's more liberal atmosphere that later came back to haunt it.
The financial backing needed for construction of a new Residential College never materialized and instead the RC moved into East Quadrangle. Classes began in the fall of 1967.
Almost immediately, the Residential College became embroiled in a series of controversies, which, from time to time, have threatened to curtail its existence. Initially, some faculty and administrators objected to its innovative pass-fail grading, a system of evaluation in which an RC student received a simple pass or fail designation rather than the traditional letter grade along with written comments on his or her performance by the professor teaching the class. Critics claimed that the liberal no-grade system failed to motivate students and hindered them when applying to graduate school. RC supporters responded by insisting that the written evaluation actually provided a better measure of the student's learning progress than a flat letter grade. In the end, the latter argument prevailed. Evaluative pass-fail grading remained. (Ironically, numerous universities have adopted pass-fail grading since then, and the RC, in contrast, has now given students the option of receiving a letter grade in junior and senior level courses.)
RC students, on the other hand, began to raise objections to what they perceived as the College's unreasonably stringent requirements— a stiff language proficiency, a two-year residency rule and standardized "core" courses mandatory for all freshmen and sophomores. These, they claimed, were incongruous with the overall concept of a flexible curriculum.
"Those were trying times," recalls James Robertson, the first dean of the RC. "The students were challenging all authority, all requirements. They were also a lively, politically sensitive group then." But he dismisses this partly as a reflection of the generally more progressive, inquisitive and adventuresome attitudes characteristic of many of the students who choose to attend the Residential College.
"We were really just a barometer of the social and political action on campus," he explains. Nevertheless, its activism and social protest earned the RC an unsavory image, which has been difficult to shake.
Despite its rather fitful beginning, the Residential College has finally become an integrated but recognizably distinct part of the total University community. What makes it unique (and helps assure its continuation) is the alternative it offers to students who desire something other than what they perceive as an impersonal, mass-produced university education.
"There are many people who wouldn't have come to Michigan if it hadn't been for the RC," says Robertson. Marcy Bohm is one of them.
"The idea of having the intimacy of a small college inside a larger institution with all its resources really appealed to me," says Marcy, a 1976 graduate who admits she was "alienated by the bigness of the University."
Inasmuch as students both live and attend classes in the Residential College, they are able to work and socialize with each other and with their professors more than usual. Classes are small (usually 10-30 as compared to the 40 to 300-student lecture courses in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts) and students confer regularly with faculty on their progress.
"The main difference between my regular classes and those in the RC is that I continue to see my RC students and have a much better sense of rapport with them," comments Robertson. "I really enjoy that."
Small classes and high faculty interest have also enabled the Residential College to develop a distinctive curriculum (although it is administratively still under the auspices of LSA) and serve as an experimental classroom for new teaching methods.
"We don't duplicate what's done in LSA," emphasizes Zelda (Zee) Gamson, who is now program developer for the College. "We are expected to be the innovative arm of LSA. We try to think of ourselves as doing things that are positively different. Sometimes those things work well. Sometimes they don't. But we can take risks that a regular academic department can't take."
Actually, enrolling in the U-M Residential College is something like stepping into an educational delicatessen — the selection is wide, the choices tantalizingly different. In the RC, students make their own films and videotapes, publish their own newspaper, give weekly poetry readings, stage and star in their own theatrical productions, and host their own lecture series. A year and a half ago, the College organized its own atomic energy conference, inviting nuclear power experts, conservationists, media representatives, legislators, and national policy-makers such as Dixy Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission. A similar conference on energy conservation is slated for next fall.
Scholars and prominent educators from outside the University community are periodically invited to teach special courses in the Residential College. Among those who have set up temporary offices in the College recently are Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, Lord Eric Ashby, a noted British botanist and educator, and writer Arturo Vivante of The New Yorker.
Even more conventional subject matter is given a new emphasis in the RC. Classes are not limited to a single topic of study such as botany or American history. Rather, most courses incorporate several different disciplines which provide students with a fuller perspective. A social science course such as "Making of the State," for example, looks both at the formation of Western European states and at the political structure of primitive societies and is taught jointly by a historian and an anthropologist.
"You couldn't do that kind of combining in a regular department," insists Gamson. "Here we try to bring faculty and courses together in new combinations."
RC students also have the option of declaring their own individualized concentration major and then selecting the courses that seem most applicable.
"We want to get students actively involved in their learning earlier than usual," explains Robertson, indicating that a majority of students don't take their education seriously until they start specializing in graduate school. "We want to encourage our students to become askers of questions rather than answerers and to take responsibility for their educational growth and learning."
The flexibility offered at the RC is what initially attracted Linda Severin several years ago.
"I was interested in experimental forms of education," says the senior, who will graduate in April with a double major — one of her degrees is in the RC social science concentration with a focus on humanistic psychology and the other is a conventional LSA major in philosophy. "To me, the RC offered a lot more opportunity for independent study. I've never regretted coming here." She recommends the Residential College experience to anyone "who has interests they want to pursue that can't be met in a regular curriculum."
One way for students to pursue their interests is through the RC's field studies program. Take Sue Lessenco, for example. Fascinated by the French people, culture and language, she arranged a field study for herself through the RC and spent a year studying in France. The article, "An American in Cahors: Finding the Traditions," that she wrote about her experience is soon to be published in the French Revue, an academic journal.
"The field studies program is an attempt to bring liberal arts studies in contact with possible job situations," says RC Dean Marc Ross. One student who elected to spend five months as a crisis intervention counselor for a substance abuse program in Traverse City, Mi., later returned to assume a full-time position there. Other students have done field studies with consumer groups, private companies, and government agencies.
"We're trying to help students see what they can do with a liberal arts education while they're still in college," explains Zee Gamson. "This is a better way to deal with their vocational anxieties."
Despite it’s many attractions, however, the U-M Residential College is not for everyone.
"I know I don't belong in the RC," concedes Sophomore Jim Albright. He entered the College as a freshman but dropped out at the beginning of his second year at the University. "I had to get out because I wasn't achieving my goals," he explains. "I just wasn't performing up to my capacity." He attributes part of the problem to the RC's no-grade system.
"There was no direct competition with other students. I'm basically lazy, and I have to have that extra push that you get with earning a grade." "There are really two extremes," agrees Professor Newcomb. "If a student doesn't want to work, he can get away with murder. Yet, there are others who just take off and soar. One girl had a book published before she graduated."
"It really puts a strong responsibility on the individual," comments one student. "If you aren't self-motivated, it will all go right by you."
Some undergraduates choose not to come to the RC because they wish to avoid the very close faculty-student contact and learning responsibility it offers.
"Many students are just getting away from home and prefer anonymity," says Dean Ross. "Some simply want to get away from supervision."
Others are not interested in the liberal arts education that the College promotes.
"I'm a zoology major," replied one student when asked why he had opted against staying in the RC. "Enrolling was the wrong step for me although it might be good for people interested in art." Another student, who announced his intention to enter law, felt that taking RC courses would require extra time in school that he couldn't afford.
"I think that a liberal arts education is a sort of luxury," concedes one former faculty member, pointing to the fact that three-fourths of the men and 60 percent of the women who graduate from the RC enter graduate or professional school within three years. "Not every family can afford to pay for an education that has no vocational value. There is, I guess, something slightly elitist about it."
His comment again raises the question of whether the liberal arts education is becoming an anachronism in today's heavily career-oriented educational atmosphere and whether the Residential College will continue to be an indispensable educational alternative at the University of Michigan.
Professor Ann Larimore, associate director for instruction at the RC, is optimistic.
"Our kind of liberal arts education is by far the best kind of educational experience you can get," she insists. "Most vocational or professional programs are geared only to educate students for their first job. Our goal at the Residential College is to help students live successfully as a contributing member of society for the rest of their lives. "
The Michigan Alumnus
March 1977, Page 12
