PACE_CENTER

The residential colleges are the center of residential life and an important locus of academic activities for freshmen and sophomores at Princeton, and the University is in the process of expanding opportunities for juniors and seniors to remain linked to a residential college, whether or not they live there. More information about the colleges, including information on the new four-year college system, is available at www.princeton.edu/rc.

As these enhancements progress, the colleges will continue to be spaces for students to engage in intellectual, social, cultural, recreational, and civic activities. Each residential college is an individual learning community with tremendous human resources and plentiful physical space.

Civic engagement—learning about and taking action on issues of public concern—is central to the mission of the residential colleges. Working in collaboration with the Pace Center and other campus and community partners, students and staff of each college determine how they will connect students with civic engagement opportunities that exist outside the college as well as create civic engagement opportunities that are unique to the college.

This page highlights some of those activities, though it does not list them all.

Many colleges have a direct relationship with a community organization that serves local residents. These college-community partnerships are reciprocal relationships that capitalize on the unique assets of the colleges. Students have the opportunity to work with the community organization on a variety of levels and are also able to reflect on their experience with other students at the college and participate in educational programs that complement their experience.

Every college has a college council that organizes activities for the college. One or more members of each council are responsible for promoting civic engagement at their respective college. In the past, these students have organized voter registration drives; collected donated supplies for a school in Jamaica; organized study breaks to raise awareness of civic engagement projects coordinated by the Princeton Justice Project, the Student Volunteers Council, Community House, and the Katrina Project; and partnered across colleges to organize an energy conservation weekend for Earth Day.

The staff members at the colleges are also active in promoting and creating opportunities for civic engagement. They often organize lunch and dinner discussions featuring Princeton professors and other experts on issues of public concern. Recent events have included a series of discussions with a former Princeton graduate just back from the Iraq war and a conversation with a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department about intelligent design. Faculty and staff fellows are frequently the featured presenters in events organized by the college staff, and they often attend college events as participants, adding their valuable perspectives to the conversations.

The residential college advisers are also involved in civic engagement at the colleges.

In order to maximize the potential of the residential colleges as spaces for the development of students’ citizen skills, the Pace Center is engaged in an innovative partnership with Butler and Wilson Colleges and the University Health Services. Beginning with the 2008-09 academic year, Residential College Advisors in the two colleges are being trained in the skills of community organizers.

The idea is to enable the RCAs to serve as agents of community building in the colleges. The pilot project is being undertaken with help from experienced leaders of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the nation’s leading agent for community organizing. The project’s goal is to infuse skills into the colleges that will help members of the college communities pursue effectively their own goals for their communities—their colleges, Princeton as a whole, and the broader communities of which Princeton students are members.

For more information on the civic engagement opportunities at each college, see the individual college websites.

• Butler
• Forbes
• Mathey
• Rockefeller
• Whitman
• Wilson