At Elon, Living Differently Together

Elon U.

Elon University officials believe that encouraging undergraduates to live on campus for all four years will help them build relationships with peers who don’t share their backgrounds. That philosophy is part of the university’s Residential Campus Initiative, which seeks to foster inclusivity, says Brooke Barnett, associate provost for inclusive community.

In the fall of 2010, officials organized undergraduate housing into “neighborhoods.” The grouped housing brings together diverse populations of students and offers common social and study spaces. Faculty members live among the students in each group, alongside residence-life staff members.

Elon officials also group new students from a given neighborhood in the same sections of required freshman courses

“Like our societies, we’re a little more segregated than you’d think we’d be,” Ms. Barnett says. “People still tend to spend time with more people who are more like them than not.” That tendency often grows after freshman year, at which point students might segregate themselves on the basis of their identity, major, or extracurricular activities, she says. She hopes that living on campus will mitigate that trend.

Last fall Ms. Barnett also helped start a community dinner series, in which students and faculty and staff members grapple with issues of diversity. The most recent dinner involved student leaders from multicultural organizations and Greek life discussing how they could collaborate to improve Elon’s campus climate.

The housing program also involves expanding the number of living/learning communities. The university will add three such communities in the fall, including one where residents will explore disparities in access to education. The communities bring together diverse groups of students with common interests, Ms. Barnett says.

In the gender-and-sexuality community, for instance, half of the students might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, she says. That composition offers them the opportunity to interact within a diverse group while providing them with a safe space to be with peers like them.

Ms. Barnett is looking into the possibility of cultural-competency training for new students as part of their on-campus housing experience.

“All of these things are aspirational,” she says. Moreover, while it’s crucial for students to interact across cultures on a diverse campus, she doesn’t want minority students to feel as though they are doing so primarily for the benefit of their white peers.