ACUHO-I News Blog

We’re not going to even talk about how belated this edition of You Were Asking is. We’ll just get on with it.

I regularly get requests for an ACUHO-I sanctioned square footage for a residence hall room or suite, or a recommended square footage for each student.

We don’t offer such advice; residential spaces and the institutions that offer them are so diverse, it would be a mammoth task to do so. However, there are some resources that can help you make informed decisions.

The MGT/ACUHO-I Construction Survey is a biennial study on members’ construction projects and plans. It can be found on the ACUHO-I library homepage, in the black bar across the top. (If you are requested for a time zone to enter the catalog, supply one, then enter as a guest, no login required.)

While you’re in the catalog, search “construction” to find member presentations on the subject.

Also, American School & University magazine conducts an annual residence hall construction report. It includes the average square footage per student (including common areas).

If you have any questions, feel free to write me: emily@acuho-i.org.

  Today, I’d like to tell you about a little 40-page booklet that could prove quite indispensable to you. It is the ISSA 540 Cleaning Times, available from ISSA, an association for cleaning and custodial contractors and vendors. (Originally, the ISSA stood for International Sanitary Supply Association, but in 2005, it was changed to ISSA: The Worldwide Cleaning Association, to better reflect their membership.)

The cleaning times booklet has estimations of the times it takes to do certain custodial tasks, such as: The time it takes one person to vacuum a carpeted hallway of a certain square footage; the time it takes to clean a certain number of restroom sinks; the minutes expended vacuuming a couch. They also include the tools typically used for a job. This can help you allocate custodial staff and supplies.

 Residence halls have been around, in one form or another, for about 700 years. In 1300s Bologna, students were organized in soccii. Not to be outdone, students at the University of Paris were soon organized into paedagogies, and Oxford students were grouped into halls and colleges. This was done because of town-gown tensions: Students usually wanted lower rents than local landlords would offer. The students were also vulnerable to crime, as many were far away from home. Only the “residence” part of “residence life” was in play at this time, however. After installing them in their houses, the universities had no part in what the students did or how they lived. The students were  entirely self-governing.

In 1453, the first system of requiring live-on came into place. The chancellor of the university of Paris (split into thirteen institutions in 1970) began requiring students to live in paedagogies. These houses were still governed largely by student-elected leaders, however, called regents at the University of Paris, and principals at Oxford. These paedagogies were  the beginning of the colleges that would later split off to form the thirteen separate institutions that exist today. (The word college comes from Latin, colligere, to assemble.) The requirement to live in the paedagogies was issued for similar reasons that we have live-on requirements today: It was considered beneficial for students’ studies and their scholarship to have an established place to live with other students. Students were housed with others according to their field of study or homeland.

In about 1400, German universities established bursen. These were very large, institutional halls for students. The halls usually featured one sleeping room for 200 or more students. Monks organized, operated and lived in each hall, and taught at the university. After the Protestant Reformation, the bursen were replaced with boarding houses.

At around the same time, Oxford University established domus pauperums, endowed hostels, for their poorer students. Initially, these were governed similarly to other student residences; the university left the students to their own devices. However, the institution gradually began increasing its control over the hostels, selecting student leaders, and then faculty members, to govern the residence halls. By the 1550s, Oxford had complete governance over their residence halls.

However, when the University of Paris was reorganized in 1808, the residence halls were abandoned.  When the University of Berlin was constructed in 1809, residence halls were not included in the plans. The Reformation, which greatly reduced the influence of the Catholic church in Europe, and an emphasis on spending money on academics to the exclusion of anything else, both had a lot to do with this.

Only at Oxford and Cambridge did residence halls persist as an integral part of the higher education experience. Thus, the United States’ residence hall system is heavily influenced by England, as most of those who established the first colleges and universities in the United States were graduates of Cambridge or Oxford. Similarly, other places that have been colonized by England tend to have stronger residence hall cultures.

Source: The Resident Assistant, Gregory S. Blimling and Lawrence Miltenberger, 1981.

The first residence hall in the United States is easier to pin down than the first residence hall ever. The first residence halls ever were  in Bologna, in the 1300s. We’ll talk more about those next week.

The first residence hall in the United States was at the country’s oldest institution, Harvard University. Old College, also known as Harvard College, was not only the first residence hall, but also the university’s first new academic building and the first higher education building in the English colonies. Construction started in 1638 and was completed in 1644. It was located on the southern end of Harvard Yard. The building was three stories, with a lecture room, a library, a kitchen (including a corn room), and chambers and tiny studies (4 1/3 x 5 feet) for students. The corn room was for storing the quantities of grain necessary to feed young scholars. Grain was also how some students paid their tuition. The chambers were large rectangular rooms in which about three students lived. The studies were small rooms within these, one for each student. The study was a place a student could read alone, likely an attractive option given their communal lives. The studies were arranged on the outside walls, so each had a tiny window. There were fireplaces in the rooms, but not in the studies, so these spaces must have been quite cold. They also had no independent source of light other than the windows, as most college students could not afford lamp-oil.

The building was notoriously drafty and cold, due in part to Bostonians’ inexperience with building structures appropriate to New England weather. This wasn’t limited to Old College; many of Cambridge’s first buildings proved unsound.  After numerous repairs, it became apparent that Old College wasn’t worth saving, and construction on Harvard Hall II began in 1671. When the new building was ready, the library was evacuated from Old College, then the students (a year later!). Most of Old College had fallen down by the time the structure was demolished in 1679. No images of it remain.

The ACUHO-I Central Office regularly gets calls about legislation, particularly whether we represent the interests of housing professionals in Washington, D.C. We do! A lobbyist in Washington works on behalf of ACUHO-I and a consortium of other student affairs organizations. Our lobbyist keeps us updated on potential legislation and the rule-making process that follows passage of a bill. ACUHO-I’s Public Policy Advisory committee, chaired by Bill Fox, gathers opinions and thoughts on legislation and rules and forwards these to our lobbyist. I am the committee’s liaison, and assist them with anything they need from the Central Office or ACUHO-I at large.

If there is legislation in which you are particularly interested or in which you have expertise, the committee would love to hear from you. Especially when legislation is being debated in Congress or during the rule-making period (when the parameters of a law are set and its enforcement determined) it is important for professionals in the field to contribute their thoughts on proposed laws or rules.

As you likely know, there’s been a lot of action on Capitol Hill concerning higher education and particularly the student affairs and safety sides of things, and our committee has been working hard on ACUHO-I’s response to these issues. In the rule-making process right now is legislation on fire safety reporting; crime statistics and institutional security policy reporting (including missing persons reporting); emergency procedures; readmission requirements for service members; and file-sharing education. Obviously, housing is very closely connected to  many of these issues and we’re particularly interested in some of these, particularly the fire safety reporting. Check out this letter: Letter to Dept of Ed for HEOA Draft. It was written by ACUHO-I and our partner associations, regarding our thoughts on the rule-making process. If you can contribute your professional thoughts, we would greatly appreciate it.

We get this question all the time, from everyone in the profession, at all levels and all sorts of employ: public, private and companies. Jon and I maintain a list of citations on this topic, updating it several times a year with new articles.

Note: I’ve updated the document, now without the dupes. Thanks to Kevin for pointing them out!

Benefits of OnCampus Housing

I regularly get queries from folks who are assessing the benefits and perks for their Hall Directors and similar live-in/live-on positions. Usually these folks are wondering about the ancillary benefits: Do other institutions allow pets? Which ones? Is a meal plan included? Fortunately, there’s a great answer for this: Rich Horowitz’s Live-in/Live-on Report, an annual compilation of this data. But don’t just use the report, contribute to it too, and help keep this resource vital! Horowitz is an associate director of residential life at Vassar College.

Hello, and welcome to a new installment on ACUHO-I’s blog, “You Were Asking,” a weekly post that will explore some of the frequently-asked, or the most interesting, reference and research questions received by the ACUHO-I librarian, Emily Glenn (emily at acuho-i.org), and the excellent library intern, Jon Zuhosky (libraryintern1 at acuho-i.org). Please write us if you have a question, whether for this blog or for a direct reply through e-mail.

Note, there are two links to the ACUHO-I library on this page. You don’t need a username and password to use the library; just select a time zone and head on in!

This week, we’ll start with the FAQ of the FAQs, and one that, unfortunately, Jon and I cannot answer as completely as we (or the member asking) would like. I’ll also explain what we’re planning to do to rectify this situation.

Do you have information on staffing structures?
Do you have statistics on which division or department to which most housing departments report?

Unfortunately, our answer to the first question is a make-do sort of reply. We usually try two things:

• We do an online search for housing departments’ organizational charts. Usually we can find a few posted.
• We provide names and contact information for a selection of institutions (say, 10-15) who have similar characteristics (size, geography, etc.) as the institution of the member who asked the question. The member can contact the institutions on the list for an organizational chart.

However, we now have the capacity to create a models library within ACUHO-I’s library catalog. Jon gathered documents for our initial models collection, assignments documents. We plan to collect staffing models soon. Please send these to us if you would like to contribute; we haven’t composed an official “ask” yet, but we’re always happy to accept these things. That way, ACUHO-I members can learn directly from each other, as they do at conferences and other in-person events.

For the second question, we do have an answer, and it comes from an unusual place. In the 2008 Assignments: What are We Doing? survey by Mannix Clark, D. Cole Spencer and myself, this question was asked. Here’s the results:

• Student Affairs: 86.7%
• Business Affairs/Auxiliary Services: 10.5%
• Finance & Operations: 5%
• Other: 4%

The “Other” items include: Enrollment Management, Student and Academic Services, Facilities & Operations, a Public-Private partnership, with facilities under a foundation.

From: Best Practices in Housing Assignments, 2008 by D. Cole Spencer, Mannix Clark and Emily Glenn. Presented at the 2008 ACUHO-I Annual Conference and Exposition.