Making dormitories "more than just places to crash"

Talking of teenage troubles and the Third World; sitting in on dorm council meetings; lounging in student rooms; laying out wine and cheese on a Friday afternoon: Those tasks are part of maintaining "a familiar, friendly faculty face" for seven professors on campus. The seven are the first participants in the faculty masters program, an effort to bridge the gap between the classroom and the dorm room.

According to Assistant Dean of Residential Life John Jennings, the masters - some live-in, others part-time - are there to open up intellectual and social options, break down the barrier of "professor," build idea networks of students and staff, and forge a needed link between course learning and students' lives. Jennings and his colleagues hope the masters will help make the dorms vibrant enough to support the intense academic program. As English professor Donald Pease, master of the Fayerweather cluster, put it, "We'd like to show students how the dorms can be much more than just places to crash."

Spurred on by their newfound faculty friends, students are adding variety to a social menu that once centered around keg parties. Campus and international issues debates, film series, and wine and cheese get-togethers are just some of the new offerings. With bigger, plusher lounges on the way, cluster councils are laying plans for fall theme parties, public panels, and string quartet concerts.

Some students have been hesitant about the program, slow to warm up to the adult presence in the dorms. But though at first the objects of suspicious glances, the masters are finding ways to fit in. Ted Mitchell, an education professor and ButterfieldRussell Sage master, regularly leaves his office in Butterfield and wanders into open student rooms for a chance to chat and show students he's "comfortable on their turf, not put off by things like dirty laundry." Religion professor Robert Henricks recently stirred up Gold Coast cluster interest with a Chinese cooking lesson. And English professor and New Hamp-Topliff master Peter Travis said, "I'm not a policeman of any sort. I'm just an enabler, a liaison, a counselor."

Jennings agrees. "Students have seen that masters haven't been disciplinarians," he said. "Many times they've been advocates of student concerns." Mass Row and independent-dorm students who rejected the idea before, he said, "are now asking us, 'When does our dorm get one?' " By next fall, Jennings's office plans to have a friendly faculty face in every dorm group.