At UVA, there are three dorms which feel as if they are their own miniature residential islands: Brown College at Monroe Hill, Hereford College, and the International Residential College (“IRC”). They each contain their own culture and a unique type of student. They also have something else in common: Housing & Residence Life (“HRL”) seems perfectly content to let them die a slow, quiet death.
Brown opened in 1986 as the first modern residential college at the University, nestled in the heart of Monroe Hill until it was renamed in honor of the Brown family’s endowment gift. Hereford College followed in 1992, known as “New College” until being renamed in honor of the University’s past President and physics department faculty member Frank Hereford in 1993. The International Residential College is the youngest of the three, founded in the year 2001 in the context of establishing a community that revolves around “sustainability and cultural diversity.”
Together, they hold about 700-750 undergraduate and graduate students: Brown has approximately 226 beds available, Hereford has around 140, and the IRC has a little over 200. They don’t exist as residential side projects — they are a genuine part of the undergraduate housing stock of this University. However, the past few years have represented a shift at HRL as if the existence of residential colleges are an annoyance they must suffer through rather than value.
Last year, upperclassmen were told they could no longer request to stay in the same dorm for another year. If you lived on Grounds as a second year and wanted to stay put as a third — tough. You were funneled back into the lottery, broken up from your friend group, and quietly nudged off Grounds altogether if you didn’t get what you wanted. And the change didn’t come with a big speech about “vision” or “student experience,” it just showed up one day.
One third-year resident assistant (“RA”) in the College who has been on staff since their second year told me: “I can confirm that it is very apparent to us RAs and from what we’ve heard that HRL is trying to push residential colleges out as part of their plan to make it mandatory for second years to live on Grounds. It’s definitely disheartening to hear that they might remove years upon years of culture and history in these residential colleges just to pursue this plan.”
When I asked how this could be stopped, they remarked: “Honestly I think it would go a long way if more students spoke up about this. If some aspect of Student Council got involved or [started] a petition, it could definitely help, but I don’t see that happening until the actual policy of removing them comes into play. Currently they’re just watering down the colleges until it’s justified enough to.”
That “watering down” has already started. This year, students in the residential colleges weren’t just blocked from choosing their same room. They were told they had to reapply to the community they already live in. Not just a quick intent-to-return form but an actual application. HRL’s justification leans on a familiar criticism: that the colleges don’t live up to their “intended” communities anyway.
Hereford is marketed as a community for students drawn to sustainability and cultural diversity. In reality, many Hereford residents will tell you they only vaguely know that’s the theme, if they’ve heard it at all. The “green” and “global” language is there, but most people come to live at Hereford because their friends live there, because they like the location, or because they wanted a shot at relatively stable upperclass housing.
The IRC was intended to be a gathering point for international students and those interested in global topics. It does, of course, have a considerably larger international community than the University at large — about 30% of the residents are international students, compared to about 8-10% of the whole student body. On the other hand, this also puts the number of domestic residents at about 70% — folks who opted to live in the residential college for dozens of reasons including the simple reality that on-Grounds upperclass housing is scarce and the residential colleges at least feel slightly more predictable.
If you’re HRL, it’s easy to look at these issues and say that the community doesn’t exist so why not scrap it and repurpose it. But talk to the people who actually live there and a different picture emerges. A second year in the College who lives in Hereford told me: “Even though we aren’t necessarily bonded by environmental causes, we definitely have a distinct community. I can always ‘tell’ when someone is from Hereford or not — we draw a very distinct crowd. Is that crowd always the best one? No, but it’s definitely a distinct one.”
A domestic second year in the school of Engineering who lives in the IRC pushed back on the idea that domestic students overwhelm the international mission: “While a large amount of us are domestic, 30% international students is way higher than the actual percentage of international students here at UVA, so it is very much still a community for them. I would also say that we become, in a way, part of the international community when you live in the IRC — you have endless amounts of international food provided and you live amongst international students. So it’s less that we water down the international community, but that we become a part of it and support it.”
And then there’s Brown. Brown College, which grew out of the historic Monroe Hill complex and became UVA’s first residential college in 1986, has always been sold as a place for the “interesting and interested.” It operates like a mini-university: internal clubs that function like CIOs, a listserv that every resident can use to reach every other resident, and a shared physical space equipped with TVs, fridges, a punching bag, a sewing kit, a piano and more — all of which laughs at the idea that Brown College is failing to act as a “community.” Brown has its own semi-formal, its own traditions and one of the most successful Halloween events on Grounds: Hauntings on the Hill, a charity event that pulls in students from every corner of the University. It even recently hosted a full Thanksgiving dinner for residents. The residents also regularly interact with the principal of the College, John Casteen IV, continuing the tradition of why Brown College was created in the first place: to live among and with faculty.
A fourth year in the College who served on the application panel this year disapproved of the process: “We, in a way, do feel like the demand to make our residents reapply was an attack on our culture at Brown College — an insinuation that someone can join the community, be a part of it entirely, and then get rejected and pushed out of it all because they happened to write a less good application the year following. It was ridiculous, and so we kind of all had a mindset going forward that for all applications from current residents, as long as bare minimum effort was put in, they were going to come back.”
RAs and student leaders at Brown reportedly warned residents not to panic about reapplying while they pushed back against HRL. When it became clear that HRL wasn’t backing down, they fought in the only way they realistically could: by essentially auto-accepting returning residents and refusing to let the college be used as a numbers game. According to HRL’s own website, there are 2,875 upperclass beds available on Grounds, while each class year at UVA has roughly 4,000 students.
If you do the math you realize that even if you wanted to require all second years to live on Grounds, you’d be trying to squeeze two full classes (second and first years), plus any third and fourth years who want housing, into a capacity that can’t even comfortably hold one. The residential colleges themselves account for hundreds of those beds. Cutting or shrinking them doesn’t free HRL from some unbearable burden; it just destroys the only on-Grounds housing option that actually attempts to build a long-term community instead of throwing people into a random apartment block and calling it a day.
Unlike traditional dorms, the colleges are organized to provide the students what UVA says it values: interaction with the faculty, smaller communities within such a large university, and opportunities for self-government and programming. The HRL website itself boasts about the “distinct identities” of Brown, Hereford, and IRC. You can’t brag about “distinct identities” on one page of the website while quietly working to dilute those identities.
What does this mean for us? If UVA really cares about promoting community, tradition, and global engagement, then the residential colleges cannot be cut. This is where those ideals are actually practiced. Rather than making students reapply as if they had to win their own home back, HRL might work together with the colleges to enhance the promise of their own missions: supporting real sustainability initiatives at Hereford College, protecting and increasing the level of support for international students at the IRC, and letting Brown remain the messy yet brilliant haven for the “interesting and interested” that it already is.
The University can take action on capacity concerns and support additional housing without fracturing the communities that serve as stabilizers on Grounds where thousands of young people can feel isolated. The residential colleges are not flawless. They’re loud, they’re quirky, and sometimes they can be cliquey. But for many students they represent the hope that they can be recognized as an individual at this University rather than just a computing ID. The University loves to talk about living in community. If it chooses to dismantle the foremost places on Grounds that still feel like one, it will be telling hundreds of students each year that the communities they built were always temporary. It will tell us everything we need to know about what those words are really worth.
The opinions expressed within this piece represent the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Independent.
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