American Campus Podcast
on the social and political history of higher education
American Campus Podcast
Why colleges have dormitories with Carla Yanni
The college dormitory is an American tradition, though it hasn’t always been necessary for education. Carla Yanni tells us why the dorm has become a feature of campus architecture since the 17th century.
References mentioned this episode:
- Carla Yanni. 2019. Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. University of Minnesota Press.
- Carla Yanni’s faculty page
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Get in touch. Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu
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Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, A History of Higher Education. I'm Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. On today's episode, we're discussing the architecture of college dormitories in the United States from the 18th century to the mid-20th century.
Lauren Shepherd:For this discussion, I'm happy to welcome Carla Yanni, Distinguished Professor of Art History and Director of Architectural Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of three academic monographs, each one a social history of a single building type, including psychiatric hospitals, museums, and for our purposes today, student residence halls. Professor Yanni, it's a pleasure to have you.
Lauren Shepherd:Thank you for inviting me.
Lauren Shepherd:The book opens with a fantastic provocation. You ask, why have Americans believed for so long that college students should reside in dormitories? You explain that the dorm living arrangement was never inevitable or even necessary. So why have residence halls become such a standard feature on our campuses?
Carla Yanni:There's a way in which people know by common sense that they don't need to live in the residence hall. We know that commuters get educated somehow and we know that people who attend community colleges become educated. The ancient universities of Europe... Uppsala and Bologna to begin, they didn't provide housing for the students. Oxford and Cambridge did, but Oxford and Cambridge were the exception rather than the rule.
Carla Yanni:What I argue in the book is that for Americans, the early colleges... Many of them were remote. They were small. They were aimed at a particular religious group, you know, a small group within Protestantism. And they needed to provide dormitories because there wasn't enough room in the town. Let's say, to take the example of Dickinson College in the middle of Pennsylvania, there just weren't any d boarding houses for the students to live in so they had to build residence halls. So that's one answer.
Carla Yanni:Another answer is that going back to the 18th century, for example, Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the founders of the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that given that what would soon become the United States, given that the colonies didn't have an aristocracy, really, it wasn't so easy for the upper class boys and girls to meet one another. So he commented that going to college was an opportunity for boys to excel in business. And he said marriages, by which he meant that a boy would marry his roommate's younger sister. That was the sort of standard colonial era trope. And then I think the other part of the answer is that when Americans take on Britishisms, they tend to overdo it and make them bigger and grander than the British ever would have. So when Americans looked at Oxford and Cambridge and saw the advantages of people living together in residential colleges, they wanted to imitate that.
Lauren Shepherd:I love the line that you have early on. This is something I didn't know about the standard quadrangle, right? Which I think we all think of as just like an inherent, like if we're picturing a college, we're picturing a quadrangle. That was an invention of the 1920s. That was something that I didn't realize, or at least not an invention of the 1920s, but its heyday was sort of the 20s and 30s. So it's so interesting to see how these architectural styles are periodized.
Carla Yanni:Yeah, the quadrangle is unfortunately a, a word with two very distinct meanings in architectural history. It can either mean a lawn, a rectangular lawn surrounded by buildings. So that would be Rutgers sort of has that University of Rochester has a great example of that, but that's so that people refer to that as the quad, but they're really talking about the space between the buildings. The other use of the word quadrangle is a square donut. So it's a four sided building with a courtyard in the middle. And that can be traced back to medieval monasteries and then from medieval monasteries to medieval colleges. And yes, it became very, very popular in the 1920s in the U.S., although there are examples before that. But that was a time period when college builders were particularly entranced by Oxford and Cambridge, which most of the colleges are made up of a series of attached quadrangles.
Lauren Shepherd:Can you talk about how the dormitories were constructed as social spaces as much as educational spaces? You sort of mentioned that a second ago when you mentioned Franklin. But I'm curious, how have the physical layouts of the residence halls sort of shaped our notions of education, class, gender, race? And as you point out, even citizenship, they've been like inclusive and also exclusionary. So can you talk about some of those inconsistencies?
Carla Yanni:That's the overarching theme of the book in many ways is that college dormitories could be both exclusive and inclusive, although they were always claimed to be a place for fellowship and sociability and gathering. The idea that students need to interact with each other outside the classroom is related to the idea that college is a transition between adolescence and adulthood. It is a time for young people to move out of their comfort zones, meet people who are different from them, have a way in which they're forging their own path. And the college residence hall is a sort of transitional space between living at home and living out in the world. At least that's the way it It was for decades.
Carla Yanni:The profession of student affairs, which began in the 19th century with deans of women who were employed at co-educational schools, colleges to take care of female students. So the deans of women Then there were deans of men and then later on the two offices would be combined and it would be called student affairs. But for deans of women, it was extraordinarily important to build dormitories because that was a way they could keep the women students safe. physically safe, but also in terms of their reputation and their marriageability and so forth. Because even though they were in college, the expectation is that they were going to become wives and mothers. A student affairs professional today will say, well, the students are only in class 20 hours a week. Who's looking out for them the rest of the time? So for Americans, the collegiate experience, the whole student, the overall experience of being at college is is a far more commonplace part of the rhetoric that comes from colleges than in most European countries. They go to school for the academics, right? There's not the sports complexes. Fraternities and parties are relatively rare and so forth.
Lauren Shepherd:Is there an anecdote or two that you'd like to share from the book or some of your other recent research?
Carla Yanni:Yes. I mean, people frequently ask me if I'm in favor of residence halls or not. I mean, the tone of the book can be a little bit detached in arm's length. People made a lot of claims that dormitories would build character in And I don't see any evidence of that. I see plenty of people whose characters were worse off after a year in the freshman dorm. But in the end, I am in favor of residence halls. I do think the experience that students have outside the classroom is extraordinarily important. And I do think, especially for working class and middle class students, the networking that you gain at college That's hard to put a price on. If you're home in your living room taking asynchronous online classes, you are not going to make a lifelong friend that you start a business with, right? I mean, I think that the collegiate experience is good for young people. I would want my son to live in a residence hall. And I didn't have an opportunity to put this in the book because it didn't come up until after I'd published the book and I was doing a book signing in New York City. And there were two people in the audience who I knew from other parts of my life, but I had no idea that they had this connection. So I gave my presentation and we talked about some of the things that you and I have talked about, about sociability, about meeting people, about casual interactions that can happen in a residence hall. And one of the women in the audience, a friend of mine who taught art history at Juilliard for college, 40 years, long time. She said that Juilliard, when she first started at Juilliard, they didn't have a dorm. They did not have a residence hall. And the dance majors used recorded music for their final dance performances. And then once they built the residence hall, the dancers met the musicians and the dancers had live music at their dance performances. And that just seemed like the perfect example. And then my other friend in the audience said, oh, I worked on that building. He's an architect.
Lauren Shepherd:Oh, wow.
Carla Yanni:Great moment.
Lauren Shepherd:Yeah, the world is a small place sometimes. Well, I'm glad that you brought up the idea of being physically on campus and some of the advantages that that brings. So, I mean, do you have any thoughts in our post-2020? I'm laughing because Professor
Carla Yanni:Yanni just rolled her eyes. Well, I see this as a parent and as a teacher and as a scholar of colleges. I'd love your thoughts. I think that one proof that my book is correct about the importance of sociability and networking is the number of wealthy small colleges that allowed students to come back to campus or forced them to come back to campus in the middle of the pandemic. And then they took online classes. That is a message that living in the dorm matters. Making friends matters. Belonging to a club matters. And I'm talking about Wesleyan and Hamilton. These are expensive small colleges. So that tells you that networking is a big piece of why people go to college and why the people who make what at the time were life and death decisions about colleges made the decisions they did. Rutgers was incredibly strict. They wanted everyone vaccinated and they didn't want people back on campus. The rise of asynchronous teaching in my view, while not disastrous, is going to open up an even wider gulf between the haves and the have-nots in the world of the academy. So poorer students will stay home, they'll commute, they'll take everything asynchronously online, they won't meet anybody, they'll have a pretty mediocre experience, they'll have limited contact with their teachers, and They might end up with a degree that has a name on it, but I don't think the experience of that learning will be as transformational as if they had been there in person.
Lauren Shepherd:And I think that speaks to the move that administrators are just like conceding about college education is credentialism, right? Get your degree and that's all it's about. It's just about the diploma or take these modules, get these micro
Carla Yanni:credentials. That's another way of separating the haves and the have nots, right? So wealthy families who have generations of wealth and generations of people who went to college will say, to their teenage kid, go to Wellesley, go to Davidson, go to Pomona, go to a school that doesn't have requirements like Brown or Wesleyan. Explore, have fun, follow your dreams. And nobody else is going to say that. Middle class and working class people will say, go get a degree and get a job. As quickly as you can. Quickly as possible.
Lauren Shepherd:Right. Yeah. I'm also thinking too about how some of the more elite schools were able to require their students to return to campus. So that's assuming that they don't have, you know, family care responsibilities. The institution has the resources to provide vaccines and testing and to be able to quarantine hundreds of young women at women's schools or, you
Carla Yanni:know, I guess. Some places had a swing dorm. They had a whole extra dorm. And when people got COVID, they moved them to the quarantine. I mean, Rutgers has never had extra dorm space and never will. Gosh.
Lauren Shepherd:I also think too, this may be getting a little far afield of our conversation, but I also suspect that a lot of those institutions had contracts with their, you know, because a lot of the dorm management is managed by outside companies, the same way apartments are. And I wonder if there were contractual requirements that forced people to come back to campus.
Carla Yanni:Yeah.
Unknown:Yeah.
Carla Yanni:My experience suggests that the residence halls that are owned by the universities are usually run by the university itself, but it's like a silo within the university where they are expected to be a money-making portion of the university. And they count on that income. In that sense, I agree with what you just said, but I don't think it's that they would have a contract with an exterior developer or something like that.
Lauren Shepherd:I wonder too, just to stay on the COVID topic for one more moment, do you see, I don't know if you've, surely you've kept up with new construction. Have you seen any new patterns in maybe dormitories that have been built since 2020? Or maybe those that have been retrofitted in different ways?
Carla Yanni:Well, I have many friends in architectural history who study, as I do, the incredibly unglamorous topic of ventilation. So we've been looking at ventilation for a long time. And then there was like this six month period when ventilation was cool and people were interested in things like opening the windows. I see what you did there. I mean, it's over. It's the moment of people caring about ventilation is already gone. People have gone right back to building whatever they were building in 2019. Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd:Out of habit or because of the expense or because it's just revolutionary?
Carla Yanni:All of the above. Habit, expense. This is the way they've always done it. Big architecture firms don't design every new building from scratch. They pull a similar building out of the cloud and tweak it a little bit for its new site.
Unknown:Right.
Carla Yanni:Before there was mechanical ventilation, architects had to think long and hard about how to ventilate buildings like prisons and hospitals and psychiatric hospitals and dormitories, because they knew that disease spread quickly. in confined spaces and they thought that diseases spread in clouds of bad air called miasmas. So they didn't know about germs. Let's say this is before the 1870s, but they weren't wrong about the clouds of bad air, right? If 10 people who have tuberculosis are all breathing out in the same room and there's no way for that air to escape, it is more likely that other people in that room will catch tuberculosis. So they knew that. And they were very concerned about communicative diseases. Anyone in the 19th century who lived longer than 20 years had to have lived through a pandemic. I mean, there was typhus, there was cholera. It was constant. It was a part of their lives. And architects took ventilation very seriously. And then with mechanical ventilation in the 20th century, it sort of stopped being something that seen that it was something that an engineer or an HVAC person would do. It wasn't built into the architecture.
Lauren Shepherd:This has been such an interesting history. I have really appreciated this discussion. And how can listeners keep up with your work?
Carla Yanni:Well, my Rutgers website is the best place. I keep that pretty up to date. And I have a name that's easy to Google. When you Google it, you get me. So far, I'm the only one. So yeah, I'd be happy to hear from listeners who have further questions or want to follow up.
Lauren Shepherd:Are you working on another project now
Carla Yanni:that you want to share? I'm writing about, with a colleague, a history of the geology museum at Rutgers. Oh, wow. That kind of Combines some of my interests. I'd written about museums previously, and I'm interested in the history of science. And we have a very interesting geology museum that was connected to the land grant because geologists study soil and they study fertilizer. So having a geology museum was related to teaching farmers how to increase their crop yields.
Lauren Shepherd:Fantastic. I would love to have you back. I know that the project might be a ways out, but I'd love to have you back for that discussion. We haven't done a land grant episode yet. Oh, I'd
Carla Yanni:love to say about that. Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd:Well, thank you very much, Professor Yanni. Pleasure to meet you, Lauren. For listeners, I'll drop a link to Dr. Yanni's book, Living on Campus, in the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe, share with colleagues and friends, and leave a review. Thanks for listening to the American Campus Podcast.
