The Orbis

Issue date: 10/2/07 Section: Issues

Rice students often claim that the residential college system is their favorite part of the Rice tradition. Students at Princeton celebrate the Hogwarts-esque loyalty they feel to their residential dorms. Vanderbilt, in its continuing effort to enhance its own campus life, hopes that next year's freshman will be equally ecstatic about their Commons Experience. Yet Vanderbilt's Commons lack an important component present in all of the other systems that inspired ours: grade integration. Mixing grades in residence halls provides all students with greater knowledge transfer, a larger pool of friends, and a diversified social scene.

As if exiling freshman to the outermost edge of Peabody campus wasn't enough, they will also be socially isolated from other grades on campus. Apart from their VUceptor, next year's freshman will be hard-pressed to interact with older students. Despite the delicious food at the Commons dining hall, few students have reason to be on Peabody. Instead of focusing so much on a "class experience," the university should strive to create a "Vanderbilt experience." As a mid-sized school, it just makes sense that the university would be interested in providing forums for students to meet as many people as possible. During our time in college, it is comforting to walk around campus and know the names of many of the people you pass. It creates stronger unity. In the long term, more interaction between classes would provide more extensive networking opportunities to graduates.

If there were experienced juniors or seniors down the hall instead of equally green freshmen, perhaps a program like Vanderbilt Visions would not even be necessary. Questions about the everyday workings of the university that could easily be answered by a neighbor would not develop into nagging mysteries, as they often do now. The invaluable lessons to be shared about social life, navigating the Vanderbilt bureaucracy, and other questions could foster friendships that spanned classes.

Vanderbilt's website promises that The Commons will help students discover a "common experience of diversity." However, it is unclear how this will be more diversified than our current freshmen housing. Currently, hordes of freshman always seem to be lurking outside Branscomb, waiting for someone to tell them what to do with their weekend. It appears that most consider riding the party buses downtown or stumbling over to frat row as their only socially viable options. Many freshmen reveal that they find this pattern both monotonous and unoriginal, but they have no one nearby to tell them about other activities. If Vanderbilt used The Commons as an opportunity to increase dialogue between classes, the lesser-known aspects of our vibrant campus life would be revealed to freshman sooner.

A reevaluation of Vanderbilt's residential situation was long overdue, but it is too bad that next year's freshman will be more isolated than previous classes. The university should use the Commons to create a more cohesive Vanderbilt.

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