During his first week at Virginia Tech, Frank Shushok Jr. toured a 1960s-era residence hall that was being renovated as a resortlike facility, complete with movie theater, gym, gaming room and a salon with affordable spray-tanning.
He was shocked.
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"I remember a pitifully hard bed, a communal bath, a cold tile floor, and a noisy roommate. And that's probably exactly as it should be. Your dorm room shouldn't be nicer that what you will be able to afford once you graduate."
ADNova
School Days 2011-12
“I am operating under a completely different mental model of what residence halls are supposed to be,” said Shushok, the associate vice president for student affairs who is entering his third year at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. A residence hall should be “a place where students live so they can learn.”
Shushok instead proposed creating a “residential college” where undergraduates, graduate students and faculty could live together in a facility dedicated to learning. It’s a time-tested idea, having debuted at Oxford and Cambridge universities hundreds of years ago and then been adopted at Ivy League and small liberal arts schools.
So in 2009, Tech officials halted the renovation of Ambler Johnston Hall for a month so they could revisit the design. The salon was one of the first things to go, replaced by a suite of faculty offices. Meeting rooms became classrooms. Eighteen revenue-generating student rooms were turned into two rent-free apartments for live-in professors.
The movie theater was allowed to stay, but it became “The Theater of Learning” where faculty lead discussions about foreign films and popular culture. The building also has “The Gaming Room of Learning” and “The Library of Learning,” where the door is kept open with a wedge labeled “The Doorstop of Learning.”
It might sound like some New Age gimmick, but simply pointing out learning opportunities can change the way students think about their living environment and invite faculty members to get involved, Shushok said.
“Where else at a college or university is a student going to spend more time than a residence hall?” he said.
Many universities have adopted elements of the residential college model in an effort to connect dorm life to the classroom, but most don’t mix freshmen with upperclassmen. Nearly all schools offer living and learning communities so students can enroll in classes with their dorm neighbors. Many schools, including American and Georgetown universities, encourage faculty members to live in dorms.
The University of Virginia established its first residential college in the 1980s, and many honors dorms operate this way. Recently, some large research universities, such as Baylor University in Texas and the University of Mississippi, have begun incorporating the idea into housing for all students.
This fall, the east wing of Tech’s Ambler Johnston Hall is home mostly to honors students: 150 freshmen; 170 sophomores, juniors and seniors; two graduate students; two professors; and a dog named Liam. A west wing will open next fall to house 800 students of all majors and another professor or two. Students will have to apply for a spot, and room-and-board rates are comparable to regular dorms.
Documenting the experience
Although the learning-focused environment is a natural fit for students in Tech’s honors program, some wonder whether it will fall apart when hundreds of regular students show up next year — or when the newness wears off. Some officials have questioned whether the university can afford to cut the number of student rooms to make way for free housing for professors or build dorms that don’t cater to what some students want, like salons and gyms, Shushok said.
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