Between the Lines

When you’ve graduated from college and you think 10 or 15 years back, how will you view your dorm experience?
The freshman residency requirement mandating that all freshmen live on campus is a great idea in theory. It goes along with the liberal arts dogma they taught all of us when we first entered college: diversity, civic responsibility and campus involvement, good writing skills, strong living/learning environment, small classes and interdisciplinary skills.
When students live on campus, they are closer to the organizations and leaders that make all of these liberal arts dreams a reality. Right? After all, the administration harps on “studies” that prove students are more likely to succeed during freshman year if they live in dorms. Could it be possible that the students that succeed during freshman year could have done as well off campus?
I’ve never lived in a dorm, but when I visited, I didn’t see a lot of studying going on. Even during finals week, dorm rooms are open for business, selling distractions to students willing to procrastinate for one more hour.
When I actually witnessed someone trying to work, there were always crowds of people in and out of the rooms, constantly interrupting any train of thought, stretching a half-hour homework session into a three hour affair.
Everyone has a television; everyone has a phone and everyone has a computer with AOL Instant Messenger. People like to live in dorms because their friends live there, not because it’s a better learning environment.
Maybe the social skills you can pick up in a dorm are more important than what you can learn in a classroom. In my years at Georgia Colllege & State University, I’ve learned that the ability to communicate and cooperate in a group setting has come into play far more than my ability to solve a statistics problem. I can’t speak for the math majors, but people just seem more complicated.
So, what’s with all this parading around about? Why does the administration need to stress the “academic benefits” of life on campus when, in reality, so few people actually view dorm life as an academic vehicle?
It’s a great sell. And after all, someone has to pay for those pretty new buildings.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 19 2004. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry