PrincetonUniversity
 

Report of the Four-Year College Program Planning Committee
August 20, 2002

I. Process

The Four-Year College Program Planning Committee was charged by President Shirley M. Tilghman "to develop a program for the sixth residential college and for the two existing residential colleges that will be converted to become four-year colleges." "The program for these three four-year colleges," President Tilghman instructed, "is expected to be based on the goals set forth in the recommendations of the Sixth Residential College Program Committee adopted in April 2001 by the Board of Trustees." "Four-year colleges," the charge from the President went on to explain, "will include students from all four undergraduate years as well as a small number of graduate students, and will offer a residential experience that takes the fullest possible advantage of the diversity and educational opportunities at Princeton. Moreover, by pairing each of the three remaining two-year residential colleges with one of the three new four-year colleges, the expanded opportunities of the four-year colleges will be available in some measure to all undergraduates."

President Tilghman asked Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel and Vice President for Campus Life Janet Smith Dickerson to chair the Committee. They formed a committee of seven faculty members, five undergraduates, one graduate student, and seven administrators, with the assistant to the vice president for campus life serving as secretary. The Committee includes individuals with a range of experiences and associations with the residential college program at Princeton: one current and three former residential college masters; a residential college dean; a former director of studies; an assistant master; a minority affairs adviser; a former college council chair; the dean of the college, who currently chairs the Council of Masters; the vice president for campus life and the dean of undergraduate students, who sit as members of the Council of Masters; and the former dean of the college, who oversaw the creation of the residential college program at Princeton, and who, with the dean of the graduate school, served in the 1970s on the Committee on Undergraduate Residential Life, which proposed to establish a residential college system. The faculty members include, as well, faculty fellows of the colleges, and parents of current and former undergraduates. The secretary to the Committee served in the 1970s as one of the first assistant masters of what was then Princeton Inn College. Two of the faculty members, two of the undergraduates, and four of the administrators also served last year on the Sixth College Program Committee.

The Committee met twelve times from January through May 2002 (including one meeting with the architects for Whitman College, Porphyrios Associates and Einhorn Yaffee Prescott). In addition, four subcommittees each focused in detail on one of the principal areas that the full committee was asked to address: advising and staffing, programming, housing, and dining.

The Committee reviewed the background materials assembled in the course of the work of the Sixth College Program Committee, including reports on focus groups of students and college staff members convened by the consulting architects, KieranTimberlake Associates, and a survey of undergraduates conducted by the Undergraduate Student Government. It collected detailed accounts of the programs and activities of the current two-year colleges at Princeton. As well, it collected written materials describing the program and staffing of the residential colleges and houses at Harvard, Rice, and Yale universities. Members of the Committee visited Harvard and Yale, toured residential facilities, and talked at some length with masters and other administrators responsible for the houses and colleges. The Committee's work was informed by proposals for the design of the sixth college submitted by undergraduates, graduate students, and recent alumni in the Prospects02 competition in April 2002, for which two of the Committee's members served as judges.