Dormitories are more than places for sleeping, studying, drinking beer, and having sex. For students, they are gateways to adulthood—sites of identity formation, social networking, and stratification. For college and university administrators, dormitories are instruments of behavioral control and the socioeconomic engineering of democracy. They may also symbolize cherished values, such as elite privilege or diversity and inclusion. Like so many other environmental dimensions of student life, dormitories deserve to be taken seriously, and their history helps to frame contemporary issues like the rising financial cost of higher education, the privatization of the student housing market, and the growth of online learning. Carla Yanni's Living on Campus enriches the material and spatial history of education, a field that, unfortunately, still requires much surveying. No other country in the world houses its collegiate student body quite like America. For this reason alone, as one of the closest things there is to a genuinely unique characteristic of higher education in the United States, scholars should be interested in this text.
In five chapters and an epilogue, Yanni proceeds in rough chronological order from the development of the dormitory in the beginning of the seventeenth century until the early 1970s. She begins with the history of college housing for men. The second building constructed on the Harvard campus was the Indian College, a dormitory completed in the 1650s to house, and thereby isolate, Native American students. In 1698, Harvard constructed Stoughton Hall, an early example of what Yanni calls the “staircase plan,” one of two identifiable subtypes of American dormitories. In a staircase plan, the building is subdivided by multiple entryways and stairwells, effectively preventing large groups of students from congregating in shared spaces, where they might be tempted to do the things that nineteenth-century Harvard undergrads liked to do, namely drink, fight, gamble, and generally cause trouble. When Harvard rebuilt Stoughton Hall in 1804, the rectangular, bilaterally symmetrical building included four entryways and two stairwells, separating the dormitory into identical quarters. The more cost-efficient alternative to the staircase plan, which would increase in popularity over the course of the twentieth century, was the single- or double-loaded corridor of identical units, the architecture of mass housing for public universities.
Yanni locates the history of the college dormitory within a wider housing market that includes fraternity houses and private boardinghouses. The first live-in fraternity house was built in 1876 for the Zeta Psi brothers at the University of California, Berkeley. Other fraternities in college towns like Ann Arbor and Ithaca quickly followed suit by hiring famous architects to design elaborate houses in a variety of historical styles as monuments to their own social distinction. For many university administrators, the building arms race between fraternities was, in fact, a welcome competition, since it enabled bursars to direct more funding toward the construction of new, expensive research facilities. One gets the sense that Yanni struggles to find anything laudable in the ritual hazing and exclusionary practices that the infrastructure of Greek life facilitates, but it is a vital part of her story. After all, the frat house is the exception that proves the rule. While most college administrators have supported housing schemes in order to encourage student social interaction, Yanni's central claim is that the actual, three-hundred-year historical record demonstrates that housing on campus, like housing off campus, has ultimately functioned to segregate student-residents.
In subsequent chapters, Yanni addresses college housing for women, the construction of residence hall quadrangles in the 1920s, “skyscraper” dormitories in the 1950s and 1960s, and the rejection of high-rise dormitories following the student activist and countercultural movements of the late 1960s. Yanni's second chapter on college housing for coeds, especially her reading of the Martha Cook Building at the University of Michigan, reinforces scholarship produced by previous historians of higher education and gender, especially the work of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Unlike men's dormitories, many women's dormitories on coed campuses were quasi-domestic spaces that included common rooms where young women could learn to become hostesses and “tame” their unruly male counterparts.
Yanni's third chapter on quadrangle plans was especially interesting for me because it helped to contextualize the popularity of the Collegiate Gothic style in relation to the student personnel movement—the deans of men and deans of women who were in charge of everything that fell under the expansive category of student affairs. Academic quadrangles, in other words, are not just evidence of resistance to social and intellectual fragmentation, as Alex Duke explained in Importing Oxbridge (1996), they are also evidence of an emergent profession. As faculty turned their attention toward research, the deans took up the pastoral care of undergraduates and employed the quadrangle as part of their rhetoric of the “whole student,” a figure who spent the vast majority of his or her time outside of the classroom and for whom the university remained in loco parentis. After the GI Bill of 1944, however, when the undergraduate population nearly doubled, heavy masonry quadrangles for students at public and urban universities like Ohio State, Rutgers, and NYU were untenable. There, student housing administrators experimented with high-rise dormitories that were meant to symbolize modernity and progress rather than campus tradition. Rising above the surrounding agricultural fields of Columbus, Ohio, for example, were the Morrill and Lincoln Towers (built between 1963 and 1967), each twenty-four stories in height and together housing 3,840 students. Though residents were initially segregated by gender, with female students occupying the top third of each tower, the housing complex was racially integrated, unlike many other housing markets in the state.
In chapter five, Yanni's final set of case studies includes Eero Saarinen's design for Morse and Stiles Colleges at Yale and two innovative dormitories built among the redwood trees of the UC Santa Cruz campus: Cowell College (1963–66), designed by the firm of Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons, and later Kresge College (1967–173), designed by MLTW, another influential Bay Area firm led by Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr., and Richard Whitaker. The design of these three dormitories, by mimicking the meandering townscape layout of an Italian hillside village or by inviting students to adapt flexible, unprogrammed space to their own needs, rejected the institutional logic of the double-loaded corridor and any visual resemblance to public housing. They were attempts to solve what Yanni refers to as “the problem of size,” or how to make big research universities feel like nurturing communities.
It is a testament to Yanni's scholarship that upon reading Living on Campus, I can now think of several related topics that exceed the limits of her own well-defined project. The next scholar might follow Yanni by considering the college dormitory at either a smaller or larger scale. For example, Yanni includes little discussion of decoration, interior design, furniture, and all of the various consumer products and cultural practices that students utilize to make dormitories habitable. At a larger scale of analysis, it would have been interesting to learn more about the historical relationship of dormitories to the dining, transportation, safety, and waste systems that service them. A dormitory is really a part of a building complex, and we must wait for future scholars to help explain how all the various parts fit together.
