I’ve grown increasingly tired of hearing people say that our college’s social scene is irrefutably synonymous with heavy drinking in rooms and heavy petting at dances. In my frustration with drinking-based theories of socialization, I’ve spent some time trying to suss out what really lies at the bottom of these self-imposed strictures we tend to adhere to, such as our beloved Thursday/Saturday night schedule. This led me, like any Psychology Major, to re-examine Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in which a bunch of college students are placed into the roles of prisoners and guards and end up so psychologically and dangerously invested in their roles that the experiment had to be shut down. The basic premise is that we college students are inherently amorphous blobs that want nothing more than to fit the shape of our container.
We see the effects of this everyday: where we sit in Harris, how we avoid signing up for any class that meets on Friday, and even the way in which we avert our eyes when we see someone whose name we know but for some reason will not say hi to. As the Housefellow of Branford I noticed freshman in my dorm beginning to engage with these standards. I watched them running around, establishing their groups of friends, learning how to avoid Campus Safety, and finding out the best ways to navigate through their social and academic obligations. The popular campus concept of intimacy within Branford has profoundly affected the way I look at the dorm and seemed formative in the way these freshmen adapted to it.
It seems as though dorms always attain a sort of reputation, and it is rather stunning how much we adhere to these projected images. I started to look into the layouts of dorms, spurred by my understanding of Branford as a centrally-located and centrally-designed dorm. Is it possible that dorms without centrally-located common rooms and housefellow suites are set up in a way that undermines a basic feeling of community? Professor Ann Devlin specializes in environmental psychology and is a self-declared “architectural probabilist.”
Regarding the ways in which students interact in the dorms, Devlin put community in terms of objective probabilities. “If people are more likely to meet because social spaces bring them in contact, like common bathrooms, then social engagement is more probable,” she said.
Devlin co-authored a paper entitled “Residence Hall Architecture and Sense of Community,” that was published in the scientific journal, Environment and Behavior. The piece featured the results of surveyed satisfaction ratings from dorms on the Connecticut College campus. Essentially, the paper explains that while Plex dorms are “related to higher student ratings of basic dorm functions, such as thermal comfort, adequate bathroom facilities, and room storage,” these dorms are also “related to a lower sense of community.”
The Plex is not the only area on campus where it seems as though a sense of community is lacking. Sophomore Liza Gordon lived in JA her freshman year.
“I felt a little removed from campus – you can basically stay there the entire week,” she said. “It felt exclusive and isolated.”
Gordon also commented on the ways in which the dining halls divide our campus into those who dine North and those who dine South.
“I went to JA for dinner the other day and saw a bunch of people I hadn’t seen all year,” she said. Her story represents a sentiment I’ve heard echoed throughout our school.
I suppose it’s inevitable and perhaps necessary that the dorms attain certain reputations, but when we let these social constructions govern the way we socialize on campus we limit ourselves to certain pre-determined scripts and interactions. I think we sometimes forget (I know I do) that we are the ones who determine which dorms have community and which dorms do not. We live on a very small, closed campus. We grow so accustomed to this that by senior year the walk from South to North campus seems impossible. But I think we sometimes forget that we are the ones who determine which dorms have community and which dorms do not. Social etiquette on our campus seems to dictate that Thursday and Saturday nights are the only nights that treks across campus to meet random people are appropriate, and furthermore, it’s often assumed that both parties will not really remember the meeting in the morning. This is probably the most basic way in which the norms we have established on campus are detrimental to forming a better sense of community as a college.
I am definitely not innocent in any of this, but the ghost of winter solstice future showed me that I will die alone if I don’t do something to change before I graduate. No matter what dorm you live in and how alienated you feel from your peers, keep your door open, explore different parts of the college whenever you get the chance, and don’t let the campus tell you that you’re only allowed to get social on Thursdays and Saturdays.
(Jane Addams common room, 2010 (photo by Karam Sethi) and 1940’s (Conn College Archives))
