On her book Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory
Cover Interview of September 11, 2019
In a nutshell
Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of
it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people
live in residence halls during a transformational moment in their lives. And
lots of people pay for their children to live in dormitories, too. But few stop
to think about the way these everyday structures shape young lives.
Living on Campus is the first and only book that
looks at the architectural history of this commonplace building type. I argue
that college students dwelling together is not obvious or inevitable. Instead,
it is an artifact of three centuries of American educational ideology that
placed an outsized value on socialization. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, students were boys who needed moral guidance; in the nineteenth
century, women began attending college in large numbers, always under
protective eyes; as the concept of the adolescent emerged around 1900, youthful
men were encouraged to delay adulthood; in the Fifties, they were GIs eager to
re-enter society; in the Sixties, students were members of a youth culture that
administrators almost feared. This mad dash through the centuries is obviously
oversimplified, and yet it nonetheless demonstrates that today’s students bear
little resemblance to their forebears, which makes it all the more remarkable
that the residence hall still thrives.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence halls during a transformational moment in their lives. And lots of people pay for their children to live in dormitories, too. But few stop to think about the way these everyday structures shape young lives.
Living on Campus is the first and only book that looks at the architectural history of this commonplace building type. I argue that college students dwelling together is not obvious or inevitable. Instead, it is an artifact of three centuries of American educational ideology that placed an outsized value on socialization. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, students were boys who needed moral guidance; in the nineteenth century, women began attending college in large numbers, always under protective eyes; as the concept of the adolescent emerged around 1900, youthful men were encouraged to delay adulthood; in the Fifties, they were GIs eager to re-enter society; in the Sixties, students were members of a youth culture that administrators almost feared. This mad dash through the centuries is obviously oversimplified, and yet it nonetheless demonstrates that today’s students bear little resemblance to their forebears, which makes it all the more remarkable that the residence hall still thrives.