It Takes a Village

By Will Coviello
Photography by Paula Burch

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in February, and 25 Tulane students are crouching in a wide circle. Wearing flip-flops and sweats, they're rocking back and forth on their heels. Their eyes are closed beneath brows hidden by mostly tousled hair. A slight breeze comes off Lake Pontchartrain and skirts across the campground in Fontainebleau State Park on the Northshore. Many grin in vague discomfort as two students explain the rules of a game that looks like nothing so much as a very mild form of hazing.

"The first rule is, don't cheat," says Hamilton Simons-Jones. "The second rule is, if you're tapped once, repeat the rules. If you're tapped twice, stand up. And if you're tapped three times, do whatever you want."

Simons-Jones and Kirsten Eby repeat the rules. While the game is more disorienting than fun, the students know it has a point; they just haven't figured out what the point is. The exercise is part of a retreat for members of Tulane's new Urban Village residential community, a group of students with common interests who not only share living space but also special academic classes. They organized the weekend trip themselves to discuss issues in community service, education and leadership.

The two facilitators finish the rules and start walking around the circle, occasionally tapping someone once on the shoulder. The first students tapped repeat the rules. Some project it like a mantra; others whisper as if it were a penalty for being tapped only once.

After a few minutes the game is going nowhere. A handful of students are standing, and many are repeating various parts of the rules. The game's logic seems circuitous.

Finally, two women get three taps. They stand up and retreat to a picnic table to watch. After a minute, one glances at a squatting friend and gets an idea. She walks to the circle and taps her friend three times. They both return to the picnic table. Then they both get the point and start tapping everybody's shoulders three times. Soon, no one is left squatting, standing or playing.

That's the beginning of a discussion about empowerment. "When did you realize you could end the game?" asks observer Penny Wyatt, then Tulane's director of residence life, who has since taken on the job of project manager for the living-learning communities as a whole. Why did the students walk away from the game at first? Why did they return? Why did they decide to take charge?

The conversation quickly changes as the same types of questions are applied to their experiences in the Urban Village. The selective program offers students special courses and evening programs, but the concept of the village is to create an engaging environment. Many of these students chose Tulane over other top schools specifically to live in the Urban Village.

Organizing the community was left to the students. There was some confusion as the students, most newly arrived for the beginning of their university careers, hesitated to take up the gauntlet. "We lost a whole month," says Martha Braithwaite, a freshman from Vermont. "A lot of us were frustrated and wanted to get things done."

Eventually, students stepped forward to organize the group. By the end of the first semester they had renegotiated their spring colloquium course, started their own rather anti-authoritarian method of running the dorm, and created their own activities, such as the February retreat. They developed a strong sense of ownership over the village specifically and Tulane in general--strong enough for some to enter a sit-in over university policy and risk being expelled from both.

The Urban Village is part of an effort by Tulane to enrich the residential experience on campus, particularly for freshmen. While the first year came together quickly and was experimental in nature, the project aimed to integrate academic and social life. Students would share a residence hall and be classmates in a group of core courses. Additional programming would bring their professors to the residence hall and, ideally, into their community.

The project evolved from a 1997 report by former provost Martha Gilliland (now chancellor of the University of Missouri-Kansas City). On a retreat to discuss new ideas, focus groups of administrators and faculty agreed that the freshman living experiences at Tulane needed improvement.

Recently tenured associate professor of English Amy Koritz wasn't even supposed to be at the retreat, but went as a replacement for someone who couldn't make it. She ended up volunteering to head a committee that would shape the First-Year Experience project. The committee's initial efforts created "Explore New Orleans" field trips and "Lagniappe Thursday" events on campus that featured informal discussions with local celebrities such as jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis. While such programs were popular, there was no link to academics or residence life.

"We wanted to shift the culture of the residence halls to at least have the possibility of an intellectual climate," Koritz says.

As she delved further, researching programs at other universities, she realized that more faculty-student interaction was necessary and that the freshman program needed a more academic structure. Thus, the concept of the living-learning communities was born.

While social-living groups such as fraternities and sororities offer social grounding, they don't integrate the academic side of university life, Koritz notes. Even the existing theme-living opportunities at Tulane--the honors dorm and residence hall floors devoted to students interested in the creative and performing arts, engineering and technology, and women in science--don't offer much in the way of classes. They centralize students with common interests but don't have a lot of faculty involvement.

The Urban Village does it all, offering a structure that facilitates both social and academic integration. The idea to focus on urban themes came from faculty members who wanted to originate a living-learning community where urban issues ranging from art and architecture to social psychology would be studied. It also seemed like a good introduction to the freshman participants' new home in New Orleans, Koritz says.

The Office of the Provost, the Collins C. Diboll Foundation, and Tulane board members Peter Aron, on behalf of the Aron Foundation, and Phil Carroll provided funding for the Urban Village project. The Department of Housing and Residence Life and the School of Architecture contributed staff resources.

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