On the origins
During the waning weeks of summer, thousands of MIT students replay a phenomenon as old as formal education itself – arriving at their new academic home. Before the first residential colleges emerged in Europe in the 12th century, other forms of living and learning in particular places, residential education, existed across the globe.
From Plato’s Academy in the northwestern outskirts of Athens in 387 BC and across ancient China at the regional academies of the Qing dynasty and at Al-Azhar university in Cairo founded in 970 CE and other centers of learning across Africa and the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, students and teachers have come together in designated places to teach and learn. Many of these were located in cities which have functioned for millennia as nodes of trade, sites of manufacturing and production, seats of religious and political power, wellsprings of culture and innovation. In guilds, seminaries, societies, schools, colleges and universities, these institutions have concentrated intellectual and material resources in loci of learning.
In the modern era of western universities, residential education is popularly considered the norm, though still not the experience of many students. In the US, about 40% of all students enrolled at public four-year universities and colleges and almost 60% at private universities live on campus (Urban Institute 2015-16).
Across Europe only about 15% of enrolled students live in institutional accommodations, and the remaining live off campus – 34% live with parents, 26% with a partner or children and the remaining live alone, while in Canada only 8% of students live on their university campus – the rest living mostly at home with their parents (Usher 2021; Schirmer et al. 2024).
However, in the US we often associate the idea of going to college with the essential act of leaving home and living on or near a university campus – the residential education experience. The statistics above show that doing so is less common than the popular culture would suggest and more of a privilege than is generally appreciated.
The position of MIT Head of House in its current title and form started as Housemaster in 1958 with Prof. Howard Bartlett and his wife Helen in Burton House. Before then, in the early 1950s, some dormitories had a faculty resident, whose duties were relatively limited. Today’s 19 undergraduate and 12 graduate Heads of House assisted by Associate Heads of House, welcome students to campus not only to facilitate their time in the classroom but to support the manifold learning they will engage in as they settle into a new home, most sharing their living quarters with one or more roommates, in a new community, in a new city.
We welcome them knowing the trajectory of their lives will forever be demarcated by the gravity-turn of their arrival on campus – their previous accomplishments and interests fundamentally and irrevocably altered and enriched by the residential experience. And like other stewards of residential education throughout history, the MIT Heads and Associate Heads of House act as primary stewards of that experience.
What we do
Our frontline role begins with the reality that much learning happens outside of the classroom and in the residence halls. It only takes a visit to any undergraduate dormitory on a weeknight, the later the better and frankly most weekends as well, to appreciate the intensity of learning in the residence halls during the 50-85% of waking hours not in a classroom. Study groups fill every corner of the dorm and fully occupy lounges, conference rooms, dining halls and other spaces as they work on problem sets and prepare for the next exam.
At Baker House, we are in this mix every day, from bringing them fresh fruit with our roving snack cart on the eve of major exams to meeting weekly with house student government. While a Head of House at MIT is not a college Don in the English tradition, nor a house master with disciplinary responsibilities, nor a residential Dean as at Harvard and other universities, we share several priorities with these other positions. Our mandate includes acting as caretaker of the residential community, enriching the intellectual and cultural environment, mentoring students on a wide range of academic and non-academic issues, discerning in real-time the state of individual and collective wellbeing, and making best use of the wide range of resources for support across MIT.
Also, Malvina and I are Heads of House in an undergraduate dorm and while it may be obvious to the reader, it is important to note that the role of the graduate Heads of House differs significantly in many, if not most ways from that of the undergraduate Heads of House. The account detailed in this article is what we know best – the role of the undergraduate Head of House.
A visit to a dorm on campus at any time of day or night would also give you the strong sense that each residence is unique in almost every way, from the physical configuration and age of the building to the intangibles of the culture of the community – each with its own history and distinctive ongoing life – the intentional rebuff of a single standard model for living at MIT. So, while this article aims to provide general thoughts on the role of the Head of House at MIT, it is really our unique experience at Baker House which informs much of our perspective. Every Head of House has their own unique experience, perspective, and approach to their role.
At Baker, we have found that effective stewardship of community – about 325 undergraduates – begins by collaborating with our residents to facilitate their priorities. Student-led initiatives are the lifeblood of the community and are also most likely to succeed. Mentoring and supporting students in realizing their goals is a major part of our role because the activation energy for precipitating new projects is not usually a concern. Students don’t need any motivation from us to do new, interesting things.
What they may need is thoughtful and targeted mentorship on how to achieve their goals for maximum success. Engaged with us in this is the house team comprised of currently enrolled graduate students in the position of live-in Graduate Resident Advisors (GRAs), the Area Director (AD), a live-in staff member of the Division of Student Life as well as the House Operations Manager and their staff. In addition, upper-level students have the opportunity to become in-house Resident Peer Mentors to guide and advise first-year students on all things MIT.
GRAs live alongside undergraduates with responsibilities to the whole building and in particular the group of students they are assigned who live in the same area or floor as their living quarters. GRAs hold regular study breaks, help residents uphold community standards from distinguishing acceptable levels of sound from unacceptable levels of noise to roommate best practices and more. The AD works closely with the GRAs and us in supporting all aspects of house life. We manage the house team, meeting biweekly and in regular communication.
How much time is taken up as a Head of House? The answer to that question is not easy. There is no meaningful average number of hours as the semester ebbs and flows and there is no typical minimum or maximum number of hours per week. For us, the time spent has never been overwhelming or onerous but rather dominated by joyful, wonderful, and deeply satisfying interactions and engagements with our residents.
As the semester proceeds, there is always an unmistakable uptick in the ambient stress and concomitant lack of sleep and anxious vibes. Regular study breaks offered by the GRAs on their floors and whole-house study breaks produced by the entire house team – with smoothies and various activities – are a salve to ease the emotional strain of succeeding at MIT.
It is also the role of the Head of House to address difficult situations and there is a very wide range of severity, from mildly contentious and often easily solved roommate issues to true crises. As the reader knows, stress is a type of psychological pain which at relatively moderate levels can be a positive motivator but at sustained higher intensities may lead to negative consequences. Keeping an eye on the possibility of low probability high consequence situations is part of the role. We are attuned to the subtle signs of emerging crisis, but we are just one component in a deeply resourced and integrated system for supporting students.
Our first function when attending to a difficult situation is to connect the student to the proper resource at MIT, be it Student Mental Health and Counseling, academic support through Student Support Services, or other office at MIT. We have managed situations involving student-to-student violence and intimidation, self-isolation, drinking to excess including transports to hospital, allegations of plagiarism and other academic misconduct and more. For these and other kinds of predicaments, the resources to support us in our role are diverse and specialized. We are never alone at any stage of responding but often are the first to pick up early warnings of impending concern and then we act as a key link to the diversified network of support and expertise well beyond the walls of Baker House.
It is important that we include mention of this part of the role for not doing so would be to misrepresent the entirety of our experience. And yet, it should be of no surprise to readers that Heads of House are, by sheer proximity and number of interactions, more likely to encounter these issues than most other members of the MIT community. Malvina and I, knowing what we now know about every aspect of the student residential experience, embrace the central role Heads of House play in addressing these challenges alongside the spectrum of joys that characterize the Baker House community.
Resilience and solace
At the height of the pandemic, one of the messages we heard from our residents living at home was their desire to return to Baker as soon as possible. For some, not being on campus and living away from their residence halls was eroding their MIT identities. Clearly, living at MIT was central to being truly of MIT. This topic of student identity and residential education has been a subject of research interest over many decades (Chapman and Pascarella 1983; Arboleda et al. 2003; Cheng and Chan, 2019).
As Heads of House we also saw something else during the pandemic. Whether always there and dormant or an emergent attribute of residential education, we could feel that the substantial resilience of the system was on full display. During the spring of 2020 and throughout the next year, the Heads of House worked with students, staff, emergency management professionals, the administration including senior leadership as the situation and the virus quickly evolved.
Student residents of the dormitories were absolutely central to the success of maintaining operational continuity. Their valuable participation in the consideration and implementation of developing policies was key to achieving a successful outcome to keep things moving forward. We welcomed back our residents in phases beginning the fall of 2021 and then we became the front line of reporting on the state of affairs in the residence halls as social distancing, twice weekly testing, and daily attestation became the norm. We also witnessed the extraordinary service of Baker’s essential workers – our house operations manager, cleaning and maintenance staff, dining hall chefs and staff and all those people who came to campus – the essential workers of MIT – to ensure that residential education would not cease altogether.
Throughout that unprecedented time, the residential education system was surprisingly resilient by endowing the situation with a range of adaptation potentials that reduced the possibility of a systems collapse. We learned that residential education is robust in its resilience. While it would be impossible to predict how the residence halls will contend with future crises from endogenous or exogenous forces, it seems the residential context can provide a substantial reserve of resilience to the entire institute. We assert, with some authority from our first-hand 24/7 experience throughout the pandemic, that the presence of Heads of House, primarily members of the faculty and their partners, are critical elements of this reservoir of resilience.
Another attribute that we have come to appreciate is the significant capacity of the residence halls to provide solace to the MIT community in difficult times. This function of solace, especially in the preservation of norms and protection from disruption, seemed to emerge recently in response to the loss of civility on campus and beyond.
Generally, residence halls were relatively quiet and calm despite the substantial contention and outright confrontation on campus this past spring precipitated by the public outrage from the horror of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing loss of life in Gaza. While the encampment was no more than 200 yards from Baker’s front door and the frequent protests on Mass. Ave. not much further than that, the Heads of House, GRAs, and student leaders alike did not see confrontation and conflict escalate within the residence. At Baker we saw something different than what was happening very close by – a resolve to keep going, continuing the core work of being at school in the protected and stable environment of the residence hall.
The two attributes of resilience and solace, emergent or simply dormant in the residential education system, are dependent on effective stewards – positive actors – within the system. The Heads of House and the house teams, including building staff, dining staff and others working in the halls are the primary stewards of the residential experience that undergraduate and graduate students depend on to accomplish what they set out to do in coming to MIT.
As Heads of House these past few years, we have seen residential education at MIT and across academia evolve and improve with deepened resources, refined protocols, enhanced and effective engagement across the community. We have seen the collaborative work of the staff of the Division of Student Life with the residential house teams contend with novel opportunities and difficult challenges. As residential education continues to respond to a changing world and strives to effectively and humanely serve students of the 21st century, we hope that the time-honored role of a welcoming steward of the whole MIT student experience continues to be the house teams and especially the Heads of House.
Prof. John E. Fernández is a professor in the Department of Architecture and serves as director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative.
Malvina M. Lampietti is an architect in private practice. John and Malvina are married and both serve as Heads of Baker House.
References
Arboleda, A., Wang, Y., Shelley, M.C. and D. F. Whalen. (2003) Predictors of Residence Hall Involvement. Journal of College Student Development, 44(4), pp. 517-531. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2003.0036
Chapman, D.W. and E.T. Pascarella (1983) Predictors of academic and social integration of college students. Res High Educ, 19, pp. 295–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00976509
Cheng, M. W. T., and C.K.Y. Chan (2019) Do university residential experiences contribute to holistic education? Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 42(1), pp. 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2019.1659211
Schirmer, H., Mandl, S., Menz, C., and K. Hauschildt (Ed.) and C. Gwosć. (2024) “Social and Economic Conditions of Student Life in Europe: EUROSTUDENT 8 Synopsis of Indicators 2021–2024.” DZHW, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies. https://www.eurostudent.eu/download_files/documents/EUROSTUDENT_8_Synopsis_of_Indicators.pdf
Urban Institute. (2015-2016) https://collegeaffordability.urban.org/prices-and-expenses/room-and-board/#/
Usher, A. (2021) 20 Years of Data on Canadian Undergraduate Students – Part 2, September 23, 2021: https://higheredstrategy.com/20-years-of-data-on-canadian-undergraduate-students-part-2/
