Housing, Sweet Housing

By Pro by Jenna Doot; Con by Mayka Mei

PRO:Although some students are currently frustrated with applying for Residential Learning Community's (RLC's) and housing for next year, it is important to recognize all the benefits we receive from our learning communities despite the minor glitches the Housing Department is still working out.

True, RLC's are not perfect systems - but to date I have not found a university housing system that works harder to accommodate the needs and interests of its students. From the first step of placement in a learning community, students are asked to preference a community based on their personal interests in order to match that student with others who may share their interests, and are most often placed in the community of preference. Many other schools I have visited house their students by major, or give them no choice at all.

Although choosing a community instead of a building means a student may not get to choose where he or she lives, the most satisfied students I have spoken with considered a comfortable "home" to be based on the people with whom they live, rather than the physical structure. I hope that most students likewise put more value in their neighbors than the location.

The most striking benefit of RLC's is the integration of all years of students, as almost all halls now contain upper and lower classmen. As a freshman, I lived in Unity and reaped the benefits of having sophomores, juniors and even some seniors living down the hall from me. I did not have the "freshman experience" of living with 400+ freshman in Swig (when it used to be an all frosh building), but without a doubt, I know I learned a lot more from my older, wiser friends down the hall who had survived freshman year and guided me through mine.

Upper classmen welcome freshman to the community, sometimes moving in early to do so, and serve as role models and tutors for the other students for classes in which they excelled. Knowing how important those people were in my development, I enjoy being a "big sister" to current freshman, pointing out fantastic professors and hoping to inspire involvement in on-campus organizations.

Beyond the earlier model of the learning community which I experienced in Unity, current RLC's offer even more academic support in addition to the preexisting social aspect. Freshmen in linked classes have access to convenient in-house study groups and are more likely to see faculty outside the classroom, possibly at community events. Students often choose to continue taking classes with their neighbors, even after linked classes are completed.

Lindsey, a freshman in ATOM, said, "My friends and I jointly register for classes because we are comfortable as studying together in the hallway. If I ever need help on homework, I can always walk next door to get it." Lindsey is only one of many freshman who has made more bonds and friendships fostered by her RLC linked classes requirement, as looks forward to living and studying with her community again next year. Even though she doesn't know as many people in other communities, Lindsey has discovered a sense of belonging in ATOM, and now works from that foundation to meet other Santa Clara students on and off-campus through sports, mixers with other communities, programs in the Bronco and on-campus clubs.

RLC's exist for the benefit of the students, even if they seem to still be cumbersome in some cases where there are bugs to work out. Being in an RLC is not a choice; all freshman, including off campus students, now enter into the university as a part of an RLC to offer all students as much academic and social support Housing and Residence Life can before school even starts. However, taking advantage of the many benefits of the RLC's is a choice for each student to make if he or she wishes to reap the benefits of our new system.

CON:To me, Residential Learning Community's (RLC's) are like communism. The idea looks great on paper and in theory, but actually applying the practice makes for a different situation.

Here at Santa Clara, we don't have Residential Assistants, we have Community Facilitators. We don't have floor meetings, we have Community Conversations. In fact, it's not a dorm that on-campus residents live in; it's an RLC.

There's been a bit of debate about the effectiveness of RLC's: What are they supposed to be doing and what are they actually achieving? Ask on-campus residents, and many will tell you that RLC's don't do much of anything.

These days, institutions of higher learning across the nation are employing residential setups very similar to RLC's. The University of California, San Diego has six separate colleges with different curriculum focuses and separate dorm buildings. Here at Santa Clara, there are nine different RLC's with nominal classroom requirements and dorm buildings separated by community affiliation. There appears to be something about the thought of dorms with "personality" that appeals to residential directors. Could it be just a passing fad?

RLC's are supposed to create a community-based learning environment. These are meant to be buildings full of people who share the same academic pursuits and personality traits as one another, and yet a total sense of community is not achieved. To a good number of the freshmen living in dorms this year, RLC's are just dorms with random people living in them.

Walking in and out of dorm buildings, one really doesn't see a difference in RLC personalities. Listening in on one group of ALPHA members and comparing their discussion to that of a group of Unity residents doesn't guarantee a difference in conversation topics.

Furthermore, that genuine sense of community that is meant to be fostered in RLC's is only shared by those who spend a lot of time physically in their building. For those who have busier schedules and see their dorm room simply as a place to sleep, their RLC is just a label that doesn't identify them or identify with them in any way. People who participate in campus and student life outside of their dorm do not feel that alleged sense of community when they return "home" at night.

Consider Santa Clara's approach to putting people into buildings in the hopes that they'll get to know each other better. The word "Residential" applies strictly to on-campus dwellers. What about commuter students? With the name alone, RLC's exclude.

Even in their most ideal state, where all the members of Loyola share the Loyolan values and all the members of ATOM share ATOM interests, RLC's would simply baby on-campus residents. In the world outside of college life, no one picks their living space based on what their neighbor's life priorities are.

The RLC is like a security blanket for incoming students who have hesitations about living on campus. Led to believe that they'll be next door, across the hall, and downstairs from their future best friends for life, many students arrive at Santa Clara and eagerly move into their new homes. Once settled in, they are disappointed to find just as many strangers and arbitrary characters living among them as they would have found had there been no RLC program.

Just look at how many current first-year, on-campus residents plan on staying in their current RLC's. A good number of them can't wait to move off campus when they return in the fall, in which case they will have only spent one year (for the most part, three quarters) in their present RLC.

Is a total of three quarters enough time for any student to fulfill their need for social interaction in a place of academia? Probably not, and seeing as how students may be itching to move off campus, it apparently just doesn't work, either.