Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Public Work at Colgate
Brown: Where has the most exciting or surprising work
taken place at Colgate?
Weinberg: Definitely residential halls. I came up through the
service-learning moment. I was fixated on getting students out of
the residential halls and into the community. It never occurred to
me that residential halls were equally good settings to teach the
arts of democracy.
Take the typical residential hall—we pack a diversity of students
into small spaces. Ninety per cent of these students have
never shared a room with another person. Likewise, the diversity
in each hall grows as students become more diverse by race, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, AOD (alcohol and other drug) issues, and
a range of other categories. As this occurs, the halls become filled
with disagreement and conflict. Too often we approach these conflicts
as if we were running hotels or resorts. We see problems as
things to be avoided or solved.
Instead, we have learned to use conflicts as opportunities to
help students learn to do public work. We have redefined the role
of our residential advisors, or RAs, (student staff who live on each
hall). Rather than being police officers who enforce rules or professionalized
staff who solve problems, we want them to think of
themselves as coaches and mentors who organize teams of students
to tackle problems and/or take advantage of opportunities. We
have also created community councils in each residential unit where
students learn how to organize others, how to identify problems
and opportunities, and how to brainstorm solutions through social
action.
One of my favorite stories occurred in a freestanding college
house where students were organizing a co-op dining plan. Conflict
broke out because everybody left their dirty dishes in a sink.
In the old student services model, an RA would have developed
and imposed a set of rules on the house. It would not have worked.
The RA would have been demoralized and the community would
have fallen apart. In the new model, we replaced the RA with a
community coordinator (a student) who is basically a community
organizer. The community coordinator brought everybody together
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