UCA makes professors, pupils neighbors
Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007
CONWAY — Four-year-old Noah Morris was disappointed in his family’s new house. It didn’t have a lobby, much less vending machines — both fixtures in his former home.
The little red-haired boy with a soft spot for M&Ms and “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” had lived all but the first year of his life in a residence hall at the University of Central Arkansas, sharing space with kids a bit older, the kind whose musical tastes gravitate toward The Kooks or Death Cab for Cutie.
Until his family moved this summer to more traditional oncampus housing, it was one of four living in UCA student dormitories as part of a faculty-inresidence program that seeks to connect freshmen with their professors and one another.
These dormitories are called “residential colleges” because they become centers of campus life and academics. Administrators hope the effect will be better grades and better studentretention rates.
UCA’s faculty-in-residence program is almost unmatched among Arkansas’ public, fouryear universities, but it is increasingly common nationally.
The tradition dates back to the 1630 s, when Harvard University was established, according to John Gardner, senior fellow at the University of South Carolina and executive director of the North Carolina-based Policy Center on the First Year of College.
Schools moved away from such programs as World War II broke out, and universities began to focus on graduate research that consumed professors’ time, Gardner said. Even small schools began emulating the big universities.
Faculty-in-residence efforts re-emerged about 15 years ago as educators began paying more attention to undergraduates and the benefits they might get from being part of a family.
Gardner singled out a coalition of seven universities — Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Truman State in Missouri, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia University — that began meeting with one another annually to discuss ways to improve the quality of life in residence halls and to increase their focus on learning.
Now, he said, more than 100 U. S. colleges and universities — “a relatively small but growing number” — have faculty-inresidence programs.
“The students like it, the faculty enjoy it, and the parents like it,” Gardner said. “Families like to know the faculty care enough about the students to be willing to live with them.” Gardner said schools are trying to re-create residence halls as “educational facilities, not hotels and not recreational facilities.” A survey of Arkansas’ other public universities found the only other faculty-in-residence program is at the University of Arkansas, where it is limited to just one residence hall. University spokesman Steve Voorhies said a single faculty member has lived in the Northwest Quad since it opened about three years ago. This term, for the first time, an entire family — a professor, his wife and four children — will live there.
Voorhies said the effort is aimed at getting “students to relate to the faculty outside class.” At UCA, Sally Roden, associate provost and dean of undergraduate studies said, “More and more schools are adopting this program, because... we’re getting the results,” that show it improves student performance and retention.
According to UCA, 77 percent of the freshmen living in one of its residential colleges in 2005 stayed in school in 2006, compared with 70 percent of all UCA freshmen. Further, UCA-provided statistics indicate students who live off-campus typically average a grade-point average of 2. 0 on a scale of 4, while on-campus students average 2. 5, and those in a residential college average 3. 0. “Research shows that if [students ] have a connection with a faculty member [and other ] students, they’re more likely to stay,” Roden said. “If they’re successful, they’re going to be satisfied. If they’re satisfied, they’re going to stay.” COLLEGE PERKS UCA’s faculty-in-residence program began about 10 years ago when a single biology professor moved into Hughes Residential College. Today, UCA has four such residential colleges, where professors, their spouses and children live in humble quarters — usually two-bedroom apartments with one or two bathrooms and a kitchen.
These faculty members and students “live together, eat together, study together,” Roden said.
The program is aimed primarily at freshmen, and participation is voluntary. The students and live-in faculty members plan trips together, from canoeing and horseback riding to visiting art galleries in Memphis and Dallas. Participating students take at least three of their typical five classes in the residence hall in which they live. Last term, the program probably reached about half of the freshman class, Roden said.
Each residential college has a theme.
In Short / Denney Residential College, where music professor Kondwani Phwandaphwanda, lives with his wife, Lisa, and their 7-year-old daughter, Miriam, the focus is on the arts. Each year, Phwandaphwanda, who sings and plays the keyboard, drums and guitar, forms a band with a few students in Short / Denney.
Reynolds Performance Hall — and shows by the likes of a South African ensemble or a Russian symphony — is just a few yards away.
In some ways, Phwandaphwanda’s first-floor apartment, No. 103, resembles a dormitory. The walls are painted concrete. The beds in his daughter’s room are bunks. But then, there’s the sign on the door: “STOP Please Do Not Enter ! This room is occupied....” “ I live here with friends, ” the pig-tailed Miriam said as she showed off her SpongeBob-motif bedroom and her Skittle-flavored lip-gloss collection. “My friends are like family to me.” She notes an additional perk of living on a college campus: “Most people don’t have a swimming pool.” A GOOD FIT Noah, his parents and his 1-year-old brother Caleb moved in June from Minton Residential College, which will be closed for renovation this term. But they aren’t giving up campus life. Noah’s mother, writing instructor Miranda Morris, will supervise a new spinoff program — one aimed at improving connections with commuter students.
Morris said students have worked with Noah on phonics and multiplication. One day, he came home to tell her what he’d learned about the chlorophyll process in plants.
Her husband, attorney Vincent Morris, fits in, too.
“It’s not uncommon at all for me to come home and [find him ] playing chess with a student,” she said. And when he was still in law school, she recalled, he took some students considering a law career to his classes.
The faculty parents realize their children aren’t ready for all of the college experience.
Whenever students in Morris’ residential college had dances, for example, Morris took Noah, but only for about the first five minutes.
But most students try to be on their best behavior when youngsters are around, she said. “If a student accidentally says a swear word, they immediately apologize.” Or a student will remark, ‘“ Hey, Noah’s here.’ “They actually get very protective,” Morris said.
Melissa Crawford, a speechcommunication instructor, lived with her husband, Jeff, their four children — ages 10 to 16 — and their dog Tippy in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment in State Residential College for three years. “We put our three girls in one bedroom,” she recalled. Their son, the oldest, slept in a loft they created over a hallway.
Now, though, the Crawfords are living in a full-fledged apartment with four bedrooms and two bathrooms as part of an additional offshoot of the facultyin-residence program.
This spinoff, now in its third year, is called “Sophomore Year Experience.” It’s aimed at second-year students who live in a university-run apartment complex across from the football field.
Melissa Crawford said she’s “very careful for safety reasons to always have good boundaries” for her children. When they lived in a residence hall, they were not allowed in the students’ living areas.
Crawford’s family viewed the entire campus as its home when it was in a dorm. “Literally, the football field was our backyard,” she said. “There were times we’d go out, and we’d just play football.” The program is not without its trials.
PRIVACY IN SHORT SUPPLY “The students are on a different time clock sometimes from what we are,” Crawford said. They would drop by her apartment at midnight “because that’s when they’re free.” The solution: “We put a note on our door saying after 10 o’clock, unless it’s an emergency, please come back the next day.” Crawford said living with the students has been “a wonderful experience.” “ But there comes a time when you kind of long for personal privacy, and there’s not a lot of personal privacy in this job, ” she added. “Anytime, somebody can come knocking on your door.” Crawford said her children “have learned much about communicating with a variety of people,” including some from other countries. Still, her youngest, 10-yearold Kathrin, looks forward to a more traditional home someday. “I’ve lived at UCA for six years now, and... that’s more than half of my life,” she said. “I just want to live in a neighborhood, and I want to get my own trampoline in my backyard.” Junior Stephanie Norris of Clinton is among the students who have benefitted from the program.
A psychology major who now serves as a mentor to other students in Short / Denney, Norris said the program has made her feel more “a part of the university community” and also helped her academically.
Norris said students switch the lobby television to a kids ’ channel when Miriam is around.
“It’s kind of like a home away from home,” Norris said. “That’s what Short / Denney has become to me. I kind of have two homes now.”
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