Open Letter: Regarding the Residential Experience Review

*Dr Nick Voulvoulis is the Warden of Southwell & Bernard Sunley Hall, and Reader in Environmental Technology at the Centre for Environmental Policy. He has been the Warden of Southwell Hall since 2003 and Southwell & Bernard Sunley since 2011 when the halls merged. He was Subwarden and then Assistant Warden in Garden Hall from 1997 and till 2003 when he moved to Southwell. He was the Chairman of the Wardens’ Committee between 2003 and 2011, and is currently responsible for ‘Legacy and Alumni’ for the Committee.

It has recently been announced that the College has set up a consultation process to review the “residential experience” at Imperial, with the purpose of shaping the residential experience for students in College accommodation.

Halls of residence and wardening must be some of the most reviewed areas of College life, with a frequency that almost mirrors that of senior management changes. Even so, the purpose, timing and speed of this latest one seem rather alarming. You see, although one would expect that the purpose of any review is to improve (or better, make recommendations for) what it is that gets reviewed, this one seems to differ. It aims ‘to shape the residential experience’ but at the same time excluding from the process those who are at present instrumental in delivering it, this being as far as I can recall the first residential review without a single warden on the panel. Announced days after the College’s announcement for the new President (Professor Alice Gast will succeed Sir Keith O’Nions when he retires in September 2014, to lead the college’s strategy, and as part of this to develop the new Imperial West campus and the College’s links to industry, philanthropists and alumni), the review is to be completed in time to be implemented for next year’s academic cycle. The residential experience affects all aspects of student learning and its importance to any institution’s strategy is well recognised; so what’s the rush? and while there are so many questions in the air:

_Who are the wardens? What do they do? Why do we still have them? Do we really need them? and similarly: _

What are the halls of residence for? Do we need them? What is the college running them for? and so on…

How I would describe what our halls and wardening aim to provide is simple: A HOME AWAY FROM HOME. At Imperial, students come from all over the UK and overseas, some from small rural towns and villages, and can often find London and studying at Imperial hard to cope with. Most have left their homes for the first time; some are homesick and miss their families and friendship circles. Our halls at Imperial are living communities for first year undergraduates aiming to ease the transition from home to university, from living at home to living on their own.

Any accommodation a University offers cannot by magic become a learning community. There is a clear need for systematic effort to facilitate the multi-cultural/multi-disciplinary nature of a hall of residence, with students residing together and supporting each other, resulting in a greater sense of connection to the place and to the University. Historically the provision of wardening has been central to this. This is a model that emphasises living arrangements where subwardens and seniors live under the same roof, under the guidance of the warden, a member of the academic staff who also resides there.

At Imperial, we do not believe that it is possible to draw an artificial distinction between academic and personal problems. Academic difficulties may lead students to display antisocial behaviours in the residence, or to become withdrawn; personal issues may have a deleterious effect on academic performance. Because wardens and subwardens have all been through the university experience, they are able to reassure students that there are very few problems which can’t be solved if they are addressed soon enough, and that they themselves have probably experienced the same feelings of uncertainty and alienation, doubts about whether the course they are on is the right one for them, etc. A resident will often feel that s/he is the only person to suffer from a particular problem, and it can be a great relief to them to realise that this is far from the truth.

It is important that the warden or subwarden should not solve problems for the student, but should help them to discover how to do it themselves. Wardens and subwardens are required to have a comprehensive knowledge of the University’s regulations and support services and, crucially, to understand and identify the boundaries of their competence. They are not counsellors, doctors, chaplains, financial advisers, etc., but they know how to refer residents to those who are. Because wardens and subwardens are outside the resident’s academic line of authority, it is easier for him or her to approach them with any concerns. Confidential discussions may take place without the personal tutor or their department becoming involved; this may later be necessary, but frequently issues can be resolved in an informal chat with the warden or subwarden.

At the same time, we are trying to create a situation in which students can form social connections — friendships, mentorships. We’re trying to achieve a good balance between learning to be independent and also learning to live with other people. Part of the experience of living in halls is not to smooth every way for every student. The conflicts that are naturally going to arise around who left their dishes in the sink, or who is messy, who is neat, who is playing music, and who wants to study — all of those kinds of things are part of the skills those students are learning.

Of course, it’s not all about problems! Most students thoroughly enjoy their first year in College, the only year that they are guaranteed a place in halls. Theory says that the first year shapes their overall University experience and is what drives their overall connection to it. Studying at Imperial, as with many of the top Universities, comes with hard work, and people have to quickly reach a balance between their studies and the fun side of their ‘freedom’ away from family and home. Our role on this is to encourage students to channel their energy and enthusiasm into activities that do not conflict with their studies and which help them to relax, rest, make friends, and enhance their personal profiles as responsible young adults. All halls have hall committees; residents stand for election to these and, with the assistance of wardens and subwardens, organize the social, cultural and sporting activities of the hall. The election itself is a developmental experience, as students learn how to run the democratic process. The Committee ensures that activities are organised and amenities are managed in a way which reflects the wishes of all the residents of the hall. Annual dinners, trips abroad and parties in and outside the hall between other numerous diverse activities and events are organised… The committee also keeps an eye on the members of the hall, telling the warden or subwarden if anyone appears to be unhappy or unwell.

As wardens, we are here to facilitate a culture that aims to manage halls as lively communities rather than mere dormitories. Our overall aim is to work together with academic departments and College support to engage with students, merging their learning and residential experiences into a University one that they are proud of. Needless to say Imperial is not alone in offering this, to the contrary, the value of wardening provision is widely recognised by most Universities (all of the top ranking ones) as demonstrated by numerous benchmark surveys done by the College (the most recent ones in 2008 and 2011). Why the concern, then? you might ask; why be alarmed with another review?

In the past half-century we have also observed a different trend in some universities, as the need to house higher numbers of students at lower cost led to the erosion of the traditional halls of residence. As they became more centralised and bureaucratic, the oversight of campus life within them had been largely hived off from the faculty to a class of full-time residence ‘life managers’. However well-intentioned these officials have been, because they are detached from the academic structure of the university, evidence shows they have not been able to create meaningful educational environments for students. Even more noxiously, some universities have come to see campus residences as income-generating tools analogous to parking lots and vending machines. For more than a generation these deep structural flaws have cheated students out of the most important thing a university can offer them: sustained contact with their teachers in a rich and diverse educational environment.

With the danger of British education losing its appeal to international students, such systems are often heavily criticised for creating a real conflict particularly with the image of UK education sold abroad. For a long time the UK has been able to rely on the reputation of British education to keep applications rolling in. But competition has been intense. North American and Australian universities, many of which have gone back to residential systems, recruit aggressively throughout Asia, and in University rankings a strong performance from Asian countries has prompted warnings that the UK’s global success is at risk without greater investment to see off such “fierce competition”.

We have also seen luxury dorms becoming very popular for a while — rooms tricked out with all the amenities, like double beds, private bathrooms with full tubs, gyms in the hall, a trend in my view, created by private providers to increase their market share, pushing institutional provision away from their monopolies and into areas of the market where they control the rules. On one side people say, ‘Well, the students come from a home where they have their own room and their own bathroom and they have their own everything’. On the other side, the real question is what we offer so that they choose to live in halls. Our job is, as a university, to make the living situation so attractive and such an important and integrated part of the college experience that everybody is going to want (or want their child) to live on the campus, at least for a year. Institutions that turned halls into luxury hostels faced many problems, particularly as they ‘lost’ students in their rooms, limiting the ways for the University to interact with them or to know what is happening there: people may be having huge parties in their suite or else getting totally isolated in front of their PCs. That should have been educational common sense in advance, particularly with reference to first year students, but when universities place marketing come-ons to students — “we give you what you want” — ahead of educational objectives, it isn’t surprising that the result is disappointing.

In this ‘race to quality’ it quickly became clear that student accommodation is more than that. Recognised as an important part of the educational process, the last few years saw the return of wardening systems in both University and privately owned halls trying to challenge the non-monetary value of institutions’ historic monopoly on providing pastoral care, support, security and sociability. The 2009-10 NUS/Unipol Costs Survey concluded that “when universities enter into agreements with commercial operators to provide student housing, they should find it important (as many do already) to ensure that the level of service and support students receive is in line with that provided by the institution”. The ANUK Code for Educational Establishments (2008) similarly addresses the need to ensure that tenants clearly understand who is responsible for student care, with appropriate residential presence required in any residential development, which houses in excess of 150 students. Furthermore, the latest NUS/Unipol Accommodation Costs Survey (2013) is revealing in terms of the significant increases in the availability of student bed spaces in the UK being private sector-provided, increasing from 4% under 10 years ago (in 2003) to 39 % (79% of the 18,607 bed spaces that came on line in 2013). In light of this, the report warns: “It would be easy for institutions to lose sight of what they are actually selling students in letting their own accommodation… If education institutions start to look like private suppliers, they stand to lose at least some of the market advantage which has traditionally come from student perceptions of the security that attaches to renting directly from an education institution. If this happens, students will bypass the accommodation office and rent directly from a supplier. There is evidence that this is already happening ...”

There has been one University that recently replaced wardens. In 2011, a team of 28 ‘Resident Support’ Staff (with no reference to ‘pastoral care’ or ‘duty of care’ in their job descriptions) replaced 82 wardens at the University of Southampton, with staffing costs, at £824,000 per year, similar to the cost of providing accommodation to the 82 wardens lost. All views were taken into account but did not determine the outcome of the decision (which was to be reviewed after two years). In the words of the director who took it, it was a decision “not based on a democratic vote in the RSS nor by University wide consensus” but was ìan informed business decisionî.

This raises another serious implication when Universities shape the residential experience. Looking at the provision of student services at different Universities, institutional choices in treating students as customers or learners play a significant role in how students ‘realise’ the educational, residential and overall university experience. While we might argue that students are both customers and learners, the dividing line between the two has become dangerously blurred. Since the introduction of the ‘Blue Cube’ as a concept, a building and a management structure at Imperial, many share the view that it feels as if the Faculty has passed all power to central administration, and although this could have worked, the dichotomy created with the introduction of the Hub blurred even more the lines of decision making between College administration and Campus Services.

As a current subwarden and ex-president of the Union said earlier this year in his letter to the Rector, in reference to the changes in cleaning offered in halls ëWhilst the central administration might not see students as cash-cows, the Commercial Services certainly do (re-branding to ëCampus Servicesí fools no-one ñ the whole ethos of the department, not just the name, needs to change before any noticeable effect is felt)í. Strong words coming from students, but really not much of a reaction from us. In my view, there is going to be a point where a University really must decide whether it is just another service provider or a community of scholars, and I think we have reached the point where we need to make that choice now. University experience and student satisfaction are not the same. Student satisfaction is of compelling interest to universities as they seek to continually improve the learning environment for students, meet the expectations of their constituent groups and legislative bodies, and demonstrate their institutional effectiveness, but unlike service industries, which hold satisfaction as a goal in and of itself, universities typically perceive satisfaction as a means to an end. Higher education tends to care about student satisfaction because of its potential impact on student motivation, retention, recruitment efforts, and fundraising.

On top of the above, one has to consider how Imperial, an international university which provides rigorous, intensive, and research-led degree courses in science, engineering, medicine and business, located in London, with one of the largest estates of any higher education institution in the UK, is different in many respects from other Universities. For example, there is much rhetoric about the link between research and education. Indeed, at Imperial we believe it is essential to encompass and excel in both. However, there are might be many fine teaching-only institutions that offer students an excellent education, but the fact that an institution produces world-class research does not mean that its pedagogy will be research-led: peer interaction is critical, and the environment in which students learn important. Here, a residential experience has most to offer. Education does not stop at the end of a lecture or tutorial: it continues through debate with one’s peers or students of different disciplines socialising in the hall. This is one of our halls’ unsung but great strengths. Again, if one looks at the institutions that regularly top the world rankings, they all have similar attributes: high-quality research, outstanding students (like ours) and a residential experience that enhances both research and education. Although other types can do well in the rankings, the evidence suggests that they do not make it to the very top.

With the recent development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in higher education, and the prospect that technology could fundamentally change how education is delivered, it is even more critical to understand the link between the residential experience and the academic one. We might still be a long way from being able to train students to be scientists and scholars by online instruction, but the scalability and economic efficiency of online education is already causing a paradigm shift, with a new kind of mission for top universities. The leaders of Harvard and MIT that founded edX were quick to review implications to the residential experience in the future. After the launch of edX, the presidents of both Harvard and MIT emphasized that their focus would remain on the traditional residential experience. “Online education is not an enemy of residential education”, said MIT president Susan Hockfield. Yet this statement doesn’t hold true for most less-wealthy or middle range universities. At institutions like Harvard, large investments are under way not only to create the online courses of the future but also to renew the College’s residential Houses as places for students to live, interact, and learn. The recently renovated Quincy building, which now houses about 180 students, has two new elevators and internal corridors connected horizontally creating a new way for resident tutors to relate to their student neighbours and advisees, and for students to interact with each other. With several kitchen-equipped suites in the building for resident tutors; the vision for many improvements was to bring core academic activities into the House: its state-of-the-art smart classroom was championed by Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, member of the HarvardX leadership committee and member of the board of directors of edX.

Whether the predictions of how education will look in the future prove right, nobody knows. The only way to predict the future is to have the power to shape it. In that respect, I hope that the on-going review will open rather than close the doors to the necessary discussion we need to be engaging in now. Imperial has a great history of residential experience and urgently needs to have its accommodation provision realigned with its academic mission. The review process could start by understanding who we are before deciding what we can be. The potential for Imperial to place itself amongst those top Universities that will lead the future, is here, and it’s the choices we make now that will determine if we will be able to reach it. Shaping the residential experience for the College is critical. Everyone should engage in this discussion. As long as decisions are not being taken for us, and we are all involved in the process, we should be able to shape our future and have nothing to fear.