When Goucher moved from its downtown Baltimore campus to Towson almost 60 years ago, the intention was to create a serene home for students, a place where they could have life-changing educational experiences.
On the current campus, college officials are taking advantage of the latest research in higher education to re-examine the ways students best learn and live in college communities and how the design of the campus can help reinforce Goucher’s 3Rs— relationships, resilience, and reflection, which ultimately help students succeed academically and personally.
Under the new leadership of President José Antonio Bowen, a plan is being developed to create a bold vision for residential life on campus and to highlight unflagging commitment to investing in the future of Goucher College.
Already, the Board of Trustees has given significant early support for this audacious plan by authorizing a $20 million jumpstart investment to help fund the first phase of this new plan for residential life. This renovation and construction is estimated to cost $54 million of a total $170 million, 10-year project that will also address deferred maintenance in Dorsey College Center, Hoffberger Science Building, Kraushaar Auditorium, Meyerhoff Arts Center, and athletic facilities, as well as in other residential facilities.
“While we are still in the early stages of this process, we are planning on overhauling multiple dormitories, creating more on-campus faculty housing, enlarging green spaces for community-building, and consolidating dining in the heart of campus,” says Linda Barone, project manager of Goucher’s Facilities Management Services.
The college will be working with Baltimore-based architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross to complete this far-reaching plan that will emphasize new educational models and new learning communities everywhere on campus. Groundbreaking is slated for this May, with students occupying and benefiting from the new facilities as soon as the fall 2016 semester.
As Goucher’s administrators began to imagine reconfiguring campus, they drew upon studies that demonstrate students’ living quarters dramatically impact their college experience. Creating a strong residential community enables students to learn more effectively, and it makes them happier, which will help them stay at Goucher to graduation.
“The type of housing that is available to students matters, and different types of housing are more desirable and more beneficial to them at different stages of their college careers,” says Bryan Coker, vice president and dean of students. “Almost all Goucher students live on campus, and we need to give them a range of housing options that both reflect and reinforce their increasing maturity.”
Faculty and staff across campus have been reading and discussing How College Works by sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs. In the book, the researchers assert that first-year students flourish most when living in a traditional residence hall with shared bathrooms. They get out of their rooms, meet new people, have access to a community assistant, and begin building friendships.
Those relationships, Chambliss and Takacs argue, have a significant impact on the way students perform academically and continue to influence them throughout their lives. They write, “Dorms … have a fundamental power in producing friendships: they repeatedly (and involuntarily) bring students into close proximity.”
The plan calls for razing Stimson and Froelicher halls and building a new first-year village that will house 475 first-year students close to the center of campus, directly adjacent to the Decker Sports and Recreation Center and a new centralized dining facility. The dorms for new students will include a mix of single and double rooms, as well as common space outside to support community-building.
Most first-year Goucher students live in Stimson Hall, a traditional dorm, in either double or triple bedrooms. Although Stimson does offer a strong sense of community, it was built in the ’60s—as some of you many remember—and it’s now the most worn and least desirable residence hall on campus.
“For first-year students, entering college is an exciting, but sometimes-overwhelming, step toward adulthood,” says Emily Perl, assistant vice president for student success. “Integrating these students into the college community and helping them to forge friendships and build community is crucial for their retention and academic success.”
As for older students, they do well when they are offered choices with increased privacy and autonomy—shared suites, for example, where a few bedrooms adjoin a shared bathroom or living room, or in apartments that include a small kitchen.
Right now, most Goucher students live in traditional residence halls. To give them more choices, an upper-division village will replace Stimson Hall with 425 new shared suites and apartments, where they can choose to live with friends or in a single room. Located closer to the edge of campus, the units will still have access to amenities and community assistants, but in a more flexible environment that will help them prepare for post-graduation independence.
“It is our job to help prepare students academically, but also socially, for their lives after Goucher,” says Perl. “Providing them with housing that enables them to become more independent, more self-actualized, is another way to help them develop much-needed life skills.”
All of these proposed new spaces will include faculty housing options, bringing the living-learning community concept to life by extending education from the classroom to the residence halls to give students an even more meaningful campus life experience.
The layout of the villages will establish two large open spaces, with new buildings defining the edges of these innovative community spaces. The upper-division village will lead to the Van Meter walkway, and the first-year village will allow a defined pedestrian connection from the new upper-division village to the Decker Sports and Recreation Center.
“This undertaking will improve on-campus housing dramatically, support students’ success and development, allow faculty to live on campus again, and create an exceptional residential campus environment that will be a distinctive feature of Goucher,” says President Bowen. “The college also will be able to house a larger student body if enrollment grows, which will help us to be more nimble in the long run.”
Dining facilities are another important part of residential life on a college campus. By many measures, Goucher does a great job of feeding students delicious and healthy meals. The college offers many dining options all over campus, and The Princeton Review even ranks Goucher 19th in the nation for food quality.
However, Goucher’s dining locations are at odds with the way students, faculty, and staff live, learn, and work. The dining halls with the most seats are at the edges of campus and receive much less traffic than the much smaller venues in its center.
The new plan also calls for creating a large community dining hall at the Pearlstone Student Center, where students can sit and enjoy a meal together—although grab-and-go options will still be available for those with time constraints. The goal is to instill a sense of a community in dining at Goucher.
“It’s an exciting time at Goucher,” says President Bowen. “We still need to develop our plan further and raise the funds for this project, but we believe building living-learning communities is an integral part of our mission to redefine the liberal arts for the 21st century.”