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USU to open four more theme-based resident halls By
Bryan Beall According to USU Housing's website, the programs will include agriculture, business, engineering, family life, natural resources, global village, leadership, Washakie/Circle of Dreams (Native American) and two undeclared halls. To Chris Ralphs, resident director of the Student Living Center, the reasons behind the development are simple. "Theme resident halls are beneficial to students. They help students study together. They improve a lot quicker. Our goal is to tie ourselves to the university and help it achieve its academic mission," he said. The assistant director of USU Housing, Whitney Fleming, pointed out that theme halls were academically supported, with a live-in faculty member who is directly related to the college and resident assistants who develop programs with the theme in mind. "The Washakie/Circle of Dreams hall has been working directly with reservations, and next year the business building is thinking about providing a computer for each student," Fleming said. "We're challenged with the level of involvement from the actual colleges, but at the least all of the buildings have built-in tutoring." Although USU theme housing is still in its developmental stages, Ralphs and Fleming agreed the program has been successful. "There needs to be more faculty involvement, surveying and benchmarking to find out students needs, but I think it's going OK," Ralphs said. "This is only the first year, but overall the feedback has been pretty positive," Fleming added. "We did a survey of students and faculty live-ins and the majority agreed or strongly agreed that it was a positive experience, somewhere around 70 percent." However, not everyone agrees with the principles behind theme housing. In fact, the national trend of "theme dorms" has been met with articulate defiance and been labeled university-endorsed segregation. In his article "The Campus Divided, and Divided Again," Columbia University President Arthur Levine highlighted a recent survey he conducted concerning on-campus advocacy groups, including theme halls. The results of the study and the parallel arguments he included with it denounce the movement. "At best, our survey shows a balkanized campus, in which the zone of tolerance or indifference to offense grows increasingly small," Levine said. "At worse, our survey shows a more and more Hobbesian world, where each group battles against others for resources inside and outside the classroom." Author John Gibbs was more direct, saying, "Creating separate facilities for different groups reduces the chance for dialogue and interaction. If anything we should be preparing students by immersing them in a multi-racial environment, not isolating them in a single-race environment that they will most likely never be a part of in the professional world." In defense of USU Housing, only two of next year's theme halls are racially based. Still, separating buildings by major discourages exchanges between people with different interests and scholastic strengths, limiting the breadth of perspective of all residents. As Harvard professor Richard Light concluded after 15 years of researching students at some 90 campuses, "Their best experiences come in the residence halls from mixing and mingling, talking and occasionally arguing with people from different backgrounds. So common sense tells me if a college divides students, by definition they will mix much less and benefit from diversity much less." Still, Fleming points to the bottom line. "I know there's criticism that it limits diversity, but GPA's are higher in theme housing," he said. "We refer to a lot of different resources from different schools to see how they were successful. Hopefully everything will keep growing and developing."
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