Author: Richie DeMaria
Next fall, Residence Life and Housing Services intends to convert Norris Hall into the Norris Themed Village, provided enough students apply. This new housing approach will offer students an opportunity to live in one of four themed towers: Spirituality and Social Justice, Social Justice and Activism, Language and Culture and Visual and Performing Arts.
Besides sharing a tower with like-minded residents, students who choose to live in themed housing will be expected to put on themed campus-wide programming, such as booking speakers, engaging the campus in activism and screening themed movies. Residents will not only live under a thematic banner, but also use these formed communities to put their beliefs into practice.
Themed housing, which has proven successful at other colleges, is not a bad idea, and the new village may be a worthy experiment. However, unlike “peer institutions” Oberlin College or Stanford University, model schools where themed housing already exists, Oxy’s campus is neither rural nor big. Oxy is a small liberal arts college in the middle of a metropolis.
I point this out because I am guessing – admittedly only guessing – that at these other institutions, themed housing primarily serves a social function; either as a way of grouping together people with similar interests, who otherwise may not be able to find each other at a large institution, or as a way of guaranteeing a base of activity and friendship in a town where there’s little to do beyond campus bounds.
Oxy, however, is small enough that, with little effort, social activists can unite around a cause and performers can share a stage. The village idea may run counter to the liberal arts ideal of broad-minded, multi-talented students with diverse interests, insofar as themed housing narrows students to a single label or cause.
At the same time, the themes are so broad they are almost meaningless – don’t a majority of Oxy students fancy themselves proponents of social justice, or at least think they lead socially just lives? The village would simply lump vague passion with vague passion.
Maybe the village could unite people in ways un-themed residence halls never could. Maybe, in instating this themed housing, Oxy will provide students with the friends they’ve always dreamt of; if so, the idea might be worth trying. Given how small the campus is, however, it would most likely be an unnecessary and interventionist friend-maker addressing a problem already solvable by the usual social avenues.
These friendships, though, could cause insularity. For while Oxy markets itself as a uniquely urban college experience, an intimate campus in a bustling metropolis, increasingly, if only out of a financial bind, the school seems set on preventing students from extending outward. At the same time that our administration stresses the importance of seeing Los Angeles, a four-year housing policy and a correlative increase in on-campus programming sends the opposite message.
Perhaps off-campus housing can’t guarantee a different relationship with the city, or prove that L.A. is ever anything to us other than an educational backdrop to our supposedly more meaningful on-campus lives. Themed housing, however, intensifies this self-centering, and runs the risk of turning the Oxy community deeper and deeper inward.
Themed housing could be a great thing, bringing people together and producing exciting programming. Being small and in the middle of a dynamic city, though, Oxy doesn’t need it. Potentially causing further insularity, themed housing could even hurt the school, turning us away from the city we are fortunate enough to reside in and narrowing the liberal arts experience. When themed housing is instated, here’s hoping it will promote a healthier, happier community without leaving the city behind or turning the college further inward.
Richie DeMaria is a senior ECLS major. He can be reached at rdemaria@oxy.edu.
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