In an attempt to increase Northwestern’s sense of community, administrators are turning to a blast from the past: Frances Willard.
During New Student Week, an actor dressed as Willard will greet NU newcomers.
“Traditions play into community,” said Mary Desler, assistant vice president for student affairs. “We’re going to have Frances Willard running around in her costume giving something to new students and their families so we can bring this sense that we’ve been around for a while. This is a community.”
Willard’s reappearance is one of the initiatives administrators are developing to address students’ sense of community, which remains low despite overwhelmingly positive rankings for the university’s academic programs.
Students, faculty and administrators discussed the issue of community at Saturday’s Deru leadership conference, where participants examined data from a 1999 survey conducted by the Consortium for Financing Higher Education.
Conducted in 1999, the COFHE survey polled 2,098 NU undergraduates on campus and related issues. It showed 47 percent of students were satisfied with community on campus, compared to 54 percent in the 1996. The numbers compare unfavorably with the ratings of five Ivy League schools surveyed, which averaged a 75 percent satisfaction rate.
Among the five other non-Ivy schools surveyed — Duke, Georgetown and Rice universities, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — an average of 53 percent of undergraduates expressed satisfaction.
Community satisfaction contrasts sharply with academic satisfaction — 90 percent are satisfied with their educational experience at NU.
“If you ask NU students, ‘How do you feel about the academic programs?’ or, ‘How do you feel about the eduction?’ (the numbers) show up very, very well,” said University President Henry Bienen. “So the community (rating) is a problem. If the only evidence for that were the survey, you might pooh-pooh it a little bit. But it’s more than just the survey.”
Desler said concern over community has been around for years and will likely continue.
“There’s been a lot of conversation,” she said. “We need to stay in the conversation for a while before we try to solve the problem because we need to really figure out what the problem is.”
Administrators said the ratings reflect a variety of issues, such as the splits between Greeks and non-Greeks and North and South Campus. Only 14 percent of students said NU traditions were important to their experience.
And some blame the housing lottery.
“Students tell us that the people they feel most connected with are the students they lived with freshman year,” Desler said. “Because we don’t have enough housing, we have this system — which is fair — of identifying who gets to stay on and who doesn’t. But it can break up communities that are just beginning to form.”
The university plans to build two residence halls at an estimated cost of $25 million.
NU has built Kemper Hall since the last survey, but the numbers still went down. But Bienen said NU still needs more housing, even if its effect on community can’t be gauged.
Desler said changing the campus culture would require everyone’s help.
“No one thing can solve the problem — we need to constantly be looking for every single thing we do and how it might affect community,” she said.
