Residential learning communities were suspended indefinitely to improve the program after a faculty vote in November, but plans on how to do that are up in the air, and a contingent of professors is up in arms over the decision. 

“It’s not an elimination, it’s a suspension,” said Susan Perabo, professor of creative writing and chair of the All-College Committee on Academic Program and Standards (APSC), “until we can figure out what the best way is to take advantage of the parts of the program that were really working.” 

The suspension does not have an end-date, and there is not a formal committee or position devoted to re-thinking learning communities.  No one “even asked those who have taught learning communities or the students in the learning communities what they thought about them,” said Karl Qualls, professor of history and John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. 

Qualls has taught learning communities several times, and said “I was gutted,” at the decision. “It was just eliminated with no consultation, which is not how we usually do things at Dickinson,” he said.

Learning communities are made up of two or more first-year seminar courses. The nearly 10 percent of first-years who enrolled in a learning community live on the same floor as their seminar classmates, “taking the learning out of the classroom and into the residence hall, the community, and the wider world,” according to the Dickinson College website. 

“This is a big question that a lot of people are struggling with, is how housing and academics overlap and whether or not they should, and if it makes sense socially, particularly when you’re talking about first-years,” said Perabo, “Those are big, big questions that I don’t think we have our head around yet.” 

Faculty voted to suspend the program after research showing under-enrollment in the communities was presented to APSC by Noreen Lape, associate provost of Academic Affairs and director of the Writing Program. “It appeared to me that students weren’t choosing the learning communities, and on top of it there wasn’t a very strong faculty response to the idea of changing them,” she said.

Of the 42 first-year seminars offered in fall 2018, nine were under-selected, meaning fewer than 21 students requested enrollment in them. Six of these nine were learning communities, according to Lape. 

First-years request their top five seminar choices before school starts. Too few requests for learning communities as a top choice and too many requests for other seminars creates a distribution problem, said Lape. Consequently, a higher number of students are placed in their least favorite seminar choice. 

This year, “72% of first-years were enrolled in their first or second choice seminars, a 4% decrease from last year. In addition, 6% got their fifth-choice seminar, a 5% increase over last year,” according to Lape’s research, and “The distribution was also affected by the unavoidable, last-minute cancellation of a seminar.”

“My goal is to give as many people as I can their first choice,” said Lape. “I prefer to not have to go to the fifth choice.”

“Most students don’t know what a learning community is, they’re not advertised to incoming students. They’re not advertised to faculty to teach,” said Qualls, “so how would students know what the additional benefit of a learning community is?”

Aside from under-enrollment, said Lape, planning learning communities in dorms could be difficult, as students could not request roommates outside of the learning community and the pool of students was small for pairing. 

“It was sometimes challenging to house them in the ways [the seminar professors] wanted students to be housed, but we were always able to make it work,” said Angie Harris, associate dean of students, “It was not a cost for us.” 

As for students who requested roommates outside of the learning communities, “there wasn’t a way around that… although it really affected one or two roommate groups, when it came down to it,” in a summer, she said. 

Mollie Montague ’19 lived in a learning community as a first-year and later worked as a learning community coordinator. “The pool from which roommates can be picked is a lot smaller,” she said, and the “social tension” that comes from that “seems to me like it could simply be fixed by expanding learning communities and having more of them.”

“I really like the idea of having your classmates actually live on the same floor as you, and I think that worked really well,” said Stephanie Levin ’22, who lives in a learning community. “One time my hall-mate was just having a bunch of people in her room and they were just reading Marx,” she said, “It was like a conversation and it kind of helps you bond with [your seminar peers] a lot more.”

Professors teaching learning communities were offered a stipend of $1,000, according to Lape, while student learning community coordinators, who help with programming, were paid hourly. 

Lape said “I personally was more concerned about the value added” from the program, rather than financial considerations. In administrative decisions in general, “It would be disingenuous to say budget’s not a concern because budget’s a concern about everything. It’s not a crisis, but it’s a point in time when we’re being more frugal,” Lape said, though “it wasn’t my main consideration.” 

“I don’t know that they will be able to make it work without budget, but [Residential Life is] still willing to do it if faculty want to do that,” said Harris.  

Perabo said the “question about going forward is obviously then the crucial one,” and that “whether or not there’s a formal structure in place, I do not know.” 

“It has morphed, but not gone away,” said Lape, and that first-year seminar professors “still have the option to build intellectual communities and link your seminars…” 

Lape will offer faculty workshops in May on classroom community building and team teaching. “That part should be preserved,” she said, and that she encourages community activities for seminars. 

Qualls said the effort of “reimagining the experience so all first-year seminars will be able to be learning communities,” will not work “because they’re not living together… there is no vision for students living together and learning together, and that’s precisely what the learning communities are and how they differ from any other kind of first-year experience.” 

“The idea [of learning communities] was that…  it’s not just something that you do when you’re out and about on campus, but something that is part of your college experience, and I would think, I would hope, that that’s something that with Dickinson’s [emphasis of] ‘we’re a residential community,’ you know, would want to encourage,” said Montague.

Cammie Charron ’22 currently lives in a learning community and said in a written statement “LCs [Learning Communities] are not for everyone.  They were for us and we are so thankful to have had the opportunity to participate in one.  It makes me sad to know that there are going to be incoming freshmen next year who don’t even get the choice.  I probably still would have taken my FYS class if there was no LC [Learning Community], but it would not have been close to the same.”