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November 01, 2007, 07:17 AM ET
'My Dorm Is Nicer Than Your Dorm'
The proliferation of new dormitories that offer students luxury features — plasma televisions, fitness facilities, cleaning services — has become the academic equivalent of an arms race among institutions, a New York University professor says in an essay published this week in The Providence Journal.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history, writes that “students have nicer facilities and services than any previous generation could have imagined.” He cites as proof Ball State University’s dining service, which accepts online orders for take-out, and a Tufts University student’s comment that moving into Sophia Gordon Hall (right) was “like going from AmeriSuites to the Ritz-Carlton.”
Mr. Zimmerman sees several dangers in the luxury-dorm trend. For one thing, he says, high-end dorms emphasize materialism rather than the life of the mind and teach students “to expect such goodies as their due.” For another, he says, “More and more colleges now price their dorms at different rates, depending on how many bells and whistles are included. So you see rich kids in the fancier residence halls and poorer students in the older ones.”
But a college that lets the trend pass it by, he recognizes, gives its competitors a considerable recruiting advantage. So for the time being, he says, colleges are trapped in a spiral of “mutually assured consumption.”
(Sophia Gordon Hall image by Robert Benson Photography)
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