Discussion paper on Trent’s College System – January 15, 2007

Prof. Ray Dart, Principal of Peter Gzowski College

Trent’s college system is about providing a structure for communities to develop. Whether or not Traill remains an undergraduate college, each of our undergraduate colleges is now presently too large and too generally focused to catalyse real and meaningful community for the vast majority of those students, faculty and staff who are affiliated with it. The college and community approach at Trent needs dramatic change and improvement. Although I have been Principal of Gzowski College only since July, it is clear to me that we need to do much better.

The purpose of this short paper is to catalyse a renewed discussion at Trent about colleges and about the communities that they are intended to create.

The discussions around the renewal of the college system at Trent do not need, I believe, to be built around more acrimonious discussion of why the present system has declined to its presently level of extremely modest relevance. Visions of a renewed college and community system at Trent do, however, need to take into account some of the important changes which have occurred within Trent and its community.

1. With Trent’s growth to 8000+ undergraduate students (and the growth of graduate students and new faculty), the need for smaller groupings within this large mass is more pronounced than ever.
2. With 8000+ undergraduates, each of Trent’s residential colleges (assuming five colleges) has 1400+ students, plus faculty and staff. (Or 2000+ students with only four colleges.) How do you develop real community these numbers?
3. Participation in co- and extra-curricular university activities is low – it competes with may non-campus activities and the student approach to university has changed. Many students now have full and part time jobs outside of the university, and view ‘university’ narrowly as ‘classes’. Similarly, many faculty come to Trent only to teach.
4. Electronic communication has become an important mode of connecting. Trent students create more communities through Facebook and MySpace than they do through colleges. Faculty do the same through various listservs, though generally not with others at Trent.

The idea of colleges and communities should be important to the future of Trent, even if the actuality of collegiate communities at present is modest. We need to consider options and to experiment dramatically to create the kinds of communities that give relevance to the college system.

Some ideas to consider …

1. The consensus from a variety of sources is that university communities of the ‘college’ variety have a maximum total size of 350 (students, faculty and staff inclusive).
2. At Champlain this year, a double staircase (eg 1/6 of the residential area) was themed a ‘Global Learning Community’. A similar plan (with an environmental/outdoors theme) is being developed for Gzowski next year. Specific faculty and activities are intended to be connected with these communities. Could these become multi-year and ongoing institutions? Could colleges become institutions which contain a smaller number of ‘real’ communities? (Gzowski College could contain three or four communities focused on environment, on community participation, on communication and leadership, on inter-cultural learning …
3. Some universities are organizing around ‘cohorts’ of students. There are various approaches to this.
4. Worthwhile communities presently exist organized around academic programs and departments. Can we build these kinds of communities more directly a college concept? Should some programs comprise (or anchor?) their own college (eg Teacher Education, Nursing)?
5. Could colleges be organized around specified multiple programs? If colleges included specific/grouped programs (perhaps a humanities-focused college …), then natural groupings of interest and community might be easier to facilitate.
6. Should all students be part of a college? (At University of Toronto, only a portion of students have a real college affiliation and involvement.) One design option would be reducing the number of students in college communities rather than growing the number of communities which are structured.
7. Should we change our design focus to be more pluralistic, moving from ‘community as college’ to ‘community as college or program or cohort or …’ (ie if we reframe and refocus ‘Trent as community’ as a major theme, colleges would need to be only one dimension of that theme and may have a greater likelihood of success.
8. Could we reinforce college/community through course seminars, or courses, or extra-curricular activities such as intramural teams or clubs? For courses with multiple seminars could some/many/all be divided on a college/community basis for there is a greater likelihood of students (and teaching staff?) knowing each other? What about intramural teams? Or basing clubs within relevant colleges/communities?
9. Do we need to undertake some systematic research about university community options in practice elsewhere?

I hope this paper serves to frame some kind of searching process for new ideas for the development of communities here at Trent. Community is such an important part of a learning and developmental environment, and something which many of us at Trent value as important.

I look forward to the emerging discussion. I hope we are able to be constructive about how to develop this important part of Trent.

rd