<p>"ON a Monday in April, a dozen or so Cornell students living at the Alice Cook House had dinner with the legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas. They had been invited by Ross Brann, a professor of Judeo-Islamic studies, who also happens to be dean of Cook House, where his apartment has a spacious room meant specifically for this kind of entertaining.</p>
<p>The Freshman Commons at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, is to open in fall 2008 as the first stage of a campuswide conversion to a residential college system.
Meanwhile, a university vice provost was holding an open meeting, on the subject of diversity at Cornell, in the Cook common room, the setting the next night for a panel discussion on Women in Islam. Before it began, in the seminar room next door, Cook residents studying Middle Eastern languages held their weekly Jeopardy competition in Arabic; then, two graduate fellows led a study session for students seeking help in chemistry. </p>
<p>On Wednesday, all 350 or so residents students and graduate fellows had dinner together. (The food was Southwestern.) On Thursday, Jewish and Muslim students met for their weekly discussion group, and on Friday, Professor Brann was the host of a tea, where Dr. Stephen Ajl, a pediatrics professor with the State University of New York, held forth on the politics of health care. At the same time, Cornells director of undergraduate studies in French joined students in a seminar room for their weekly viewing of X-Files reruns.</p>
<p>All in all, it was only a moderately busy week at Cook, where the fusion of academic and residential life represents something of a revolution, not just at Cornell but across the country. </p>
<p>Since the mid-90s, amid concerns about the marginalization of undergraduates, universities have sought ways to keep upperclassmen from moving off campus while providing more faculty interaction and supervision. Dozens have turned to the residential college, a system intended to dissolve the borders between the social and academic elements of campus life by gathering many of them under the same roof literally. </p>
<p>Cook House, like its counterpart next door, Carl Becker House, is equipped with its own library, computer lab, music practice rooms and dining hall; each is administered by a senior faculty member who lives there, as do half a dozen graduate student mentors. Another 30 faculty and administrative fellows volunteer to lead seminars, study groups and group excursions. </p>
<p>Its all aimed at making a campus of 13,000 feel more manageable, less like an intimidating institution and more like, well, home.</p>
<p>Its the philosophy that a big university need not alienate students from faculty and that a learning atmosphere will be better if students feel a sense of belonging to the campus, explains David C. Hardesty Jr., the departing president of West Virginia University, which last August opened the first new student residence to be built on the Morgantown campus since the 1960s. The residence, Lincoln Hall, provides 350 first-year students with their own multimedia theater, library, resident faculty members and seminars that fulfill general course requirements. </p>
<p>Its the idea that to improve in the classroom we have to improve outside the classroom, he says.
(see <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/edlife/cornellweber3.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=education[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/edlife/cornellweber3.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=education</a> for complete article)</p>