When he enrolled at Stanford, Brendan Selby hoped to live in an all-freshman dorm. “You want to be around people who are going to Full Moon on the Quad for the first time, who are going through [Introduction to the Humanities and the program in writing and rhetoric] with you,” he says. “Those are the things that form the basis of friendships.”
But Selby, ’07, was one of the approximately 300 freshmen each year whose requests for all-frosh housing can’t be accommodated. He had fun in his four-class dorm and made friends—“everyone enjoys freshman year”—but believes he would have hung out with a bigger, more diverse group of people in an all-frosh dorm.
To add insult to injury, Selby was assigned to Lagunita Court, which has the smallest freshman doubles on campus. Vice provost for undergraduate education and professor of materials science and engineering John Bravman says, “Every year on move-in day, I just cringe when we drive around with the president and we have to stop at Lag.”
Bravman, ’79, MS ’81, PhD ’85, is leading efforts to ensure that no one from the Class of 2014 will have to live in the “Lagunita minidoubles.” He has outlined a plan to improve undergraduate housing over the next two to six years that includes the following key elements:
“Unstuffing” the dorms. This will reduce the number of students per room in several residences and restore study and seminar rooms that have been converted to sleeping spaces. Branner, Toyon, Roble and Lagunita would house only sophomores, juniors and seniors; and room occupancy would be reduced in each. The two-room triples in Branner and Toyon and the three-room quads in Roble would be converted to doubles, and Lagunita doubles would becomes singles. Because the University does not want freshmen isolated in singles, the proposal suggests moving Ujamaa, the black/African-American cross-cultural theme house, from Lagunita to Loro and Mirlo, two adjacent dormitories in Florence Moore Hall.
The unstuffing plan requires approximately 650 more spaces for undergraduates than are currently available. Construction of the Munger Graduate Residences will free up the 360 spaces in Crothers and Crothers Memorial for undergraduate use. To accommodate the remaining students, Stanford plans to construct a combination of dorms and Row houses, including a fourth dorm in the Manzanita Park area and an environmentally friendly Row house.
Housing most freshmen in all-frosh houses. All dorms in Wilbur, Stern and Florence Moore halls would be all-frosh except for the four-class cross-cultural theme houses Casa Zapata, Okada and, if it moves to FloMo, Ujamaa. Freshmen also would live in Freshman-Sophomore College in Sterling Quadrangle, in the cross-cultural theme house Muwekma-Tah-Ruk on the Row, and in at least one additional four-class dorm.
Providing housing of “generally escalating quality” throughout students’ undergraduate careers and simplifying the Draw, Stanford’s housing assignment system for upperclassmen.
“Pretty much everyone recognizes the need for fundamental changes in housing,” says Selby, who covers the subject for the Stanford Daily. “I would love to be going to Stanford after the changes are made.”
Selby says that a “silent majority” of students supports the changes. Criticism, Bravman says, has taken two main forms: support for four-class living and objections to moving Ujamaa.
Sophomore Andy Leifer has mixed feelings. He likes the idea that students will have access to better housing over time, but is thankful he lived in a four-class dorm as a freshman. “I really thrive on listening to older people,” he says. “They’ve done exactly what I’m doing and have good advice.” Still, he says, “I know Bravman wants to go all-frosh, and I tend to trust what he has to say.”
“Our experience with four-class dorms is that for every student who finds mentorship from upperclassmen, there’s probably more than one who’s disappointed,” Bravman says. “At a minimum, we want to meet the demand for all-frosh housing. We probably won’t meet the demand for four-class, but we’re erring badly on one side; we may have to err a little bit on the other side. We also have some survey data from our students that on average—and students are individuals, not averages—the freshman-year experience is rated more highly in all-freshman dorms. And this is not unique to Stanford.”
Proponents of all-frosh housing praise the social opportunities it provides. Living in all-frosh Otero “was definitely the highlight of my Stanford career so far,” says junior Shirin Sharif. “There was so much energy. We had 87 friends that were like one big family.”
It’s also easy to make friends in Ujamaa, says sophomore Macarrin Morton, who has lived there for two years. He speaks fondly of residents gathering in Uj’s hallways and talking until 4 a.m. And that’s one reason why Morton doesn’t want the cross-cultural theme house to move to FloMo. “Ujamaa is noted for having wide hallways,” he says. In Loro and Mirlo, “the hallways are smaller. There’s no central staircase. There’s too much space between the dorms to even think that you can begin to unify the community.”
Ujamaa residents and members of the Black Student Union and other organizations for students of color have said that if Uj is to move, it should move somewhere better. “The trick is defining what better is,” Morton concedes. Administrators have agreed to convert a number of the one-room doubles in Loro and Mirlo to singles for upperclassmen, since that is part of the appeal of Ujamaa’s current location, and have extended the offer to Casa Zapata and Okada. Some are happy with that. Others think the dialogue needs to continue.
“I think we can build a world-class facility in FloMo for Ujamaa,” Bravman says. He has emphasized in his proposal and elsewhere that the University believes in the importance and value of cross-cultural theme dorms. Indeed, he adds, the housing proposal is designed to set the stage for improvements in residential education, including more and stronger academic theme programs of all types. “I really see this, the president sees this, the provost sees this as the capstone to a decade of innovation in undergraduate education,” he says. “Now, we need academic and faculty input and guidance at a level we haven’t had in a long time through the residential education system.”
Bravman imagines an international studies theme dorm in Crothers or Cro Mem, near the Stanford Institute for International Studies, as SIIS director Coit Blacker already has suggested. Or a performing arts program that, with additional space and funding, expands upon the “great work” that resident fellows Jonathan Berger, DMA ’82, an associate professor of music, and Talya Berger, MA ’81, a music lecturer, have done in Kimball Hall. “That’s what we want to do,” Bravman says, “as broadly as we can across the campus.”
