Universities: Living-Learning Cluster

Vast universities offer great libraries, star teachers and topnotch research facilities — but often at a high cost in impersonality and student loneliness. Tiny colleges offer the warmth and human values of close relationships — but often at a high cost in academic shortcomings. To get the best of both of these worlds is the purpose of a promising pattern of university student-grouping that will be tested or expanded on at least a dozen campuses when classes convene this month.

The simplest and purest execution of the “cluster” concept will be tried at the 15,000-student Florida State University in Tallahassee, where 240 freshmen—a tenth of the entering class—will be randomly divided into eight groups. Each group of 30 will take basic courses together, sharing the same assignments and teachers. The rest of the class will be assigned in the normal unpatterned way so that the attitudes and academic achievement of the two groups can be compared.

Dorms with Classrooms. Florida State’s Dean E. Laurence Chalmers is confident that the clustering will lead to “greater student rapport and a greater commitment to learning,” because that is what happened to students in a trial run last year. Without advance word to anyone, university officials “block-registered” 30 freshmen in English, math, history and social-science classes, just to test the idea. Students quickly caught on, dubbed themselves “the group,” got together for pizza parties and bowling. The teachers spontaneously coordinated assignments so that an English essay, for example, would deal with an idea being developed in a math class. They also compared notes on student weaknesses, gave problem kids more individual attention. Perhaps coincidentally, not a single member of “the group” left school, despite a 51% dropout rate in the freshman class at large.

The surge of interest in subdividing student bodies stems largely from a less intensive, but more extensive, 5-year-old application of the idea at Michigan State University. When school opens, 14,000 students will be assigned to coeducational “living-learning units,” in which they sleep, eat and take some of their required freshman and sophomore courses under single roofs. Last year 300 freshmen moved into M.S.U.’s new Justin S. Morrill College, which accents languages and foreign studies. One-third of the students visited Russia, Switzerland and Spain together this summer.

On the Columbus campus of Ohio State University, which will enroll more than 35,000 students this fall, a random selection of about 200 freshmen in the College of Arts and Sciences will be housed in two dormitories (separated by sex), attend English, history and arts courses together. All the freshmen at Stanford will attend English and history courses with students from their own residential units.

Competing Strangers. The first of five “sub-colleges” planned within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas will open in Lawrence this month. It will handle 450 freshmen, who will share classes, housing and dormitory advisers. All freshmen are expected to be in such a college next year, all sophomores and freshmen a year later. Kansas Sociologist E. Jackson Baur hopes it will help K.U. students to avoid falling into the type he sees at most universities: “A collection of com peting strangers who are incapable of collaborating with one another in a pleasurable pursuit of scholarship.”

Even one commuter college, San Francisco State, hopes to develop cohesiveness by clustering students. It will take 60 freshmen this fall, put them together in basic classes—and also send them out on such social-service projects as remedial teaching of slum kids. Associate Dean Joseph Axelrod predicts that students in the group “will begin to care about each other.”

Planning for clusters is also under way at the University of Kentucky, which expects 1,500 of its students to take 80% of their freshman and 60% of their sophomore courses in residential colleges housing both students and classrooms. Indiana University is considering a proposal to create one residential college a year and ultimately cluster two-thirds of its students. The University of Michigan, which already assigns some classes by dormitory groups, next year will open its first residential college to 250 freshmen, who will all take a common core program of liberal arts, later move to a new campus about a mile from the main Ann Arbor campus. New Jersey’s Rutgers University expects to double its enrollment of 11,200 by 1980, but will still seem small through creation of three liberal arts colleges. The first will open next year.

Headed for Megalopolis. Universities that have pioneered the cluster concept seem pleased with their progress. Wayne State University’s Monteith College started the current trend in 1959. The University of the Pacific, which opened its first “college within a college” in 1962, will have three by next year. Two new campuses of the University of California, those at Santa Cruz (TIME, May 13) and San Diego, are building from scratch on the cluster principle. The University of Massachusetts teaches 60 sections of freshman and sophomore courses in its two-year-old Orchard Hill residential complex; freshmen at the University of West Virginia can take most of their required courses in their Twin Towers dormitory.

Not every university administrator endorses the cluster idea. Purdue Vice President Paul Chenea contends that no matter what the size of a school, a student tends to become familiar with only half a dozen teachers and a score of students. Others argue that the diversity of relationships at a big university is one of its glories, not handicaps. “Most students will not go out into the world and settle in small towns,” says U.C.L.A. Dean Franklin P. Rolfe. “They will head for the megalopolis. The big university represents civilization.”

Yet, as students complain of the “alienation” of the multiversity, the cluster idea is likely to grow. At the least, it permits nine-tenths of the students in Michigan State’s Morrill College to feel that their teachers know them by name —and how many major-university students can claim that?