“Residential Colleges Hold Key to Intellectual Life”
Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way
11 December 2001 (collegiateway.org) — A forceful essay by Reynolds Price, James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, published in the Duke Chronicle in 1993, still remains one of the strongest (if unheeded) briefs for residential colleges within large universities. “Do we actually mean to make of ourselves the great institution we claim to be,” he asks, “a real ‘alma mater,’ a nourishing mother? I hope we all choose to be realistic and begin to say, ‘Yes.’ If not, let’s admit we’re amateurs and have the guts to cancel our claim.” Duke has not yet found the will to establish a collegiate system, even though some of the most important documents of the last ten years on the poverty of campus life, including William Willimon and Thomas Naylor’s The Abandoned Generation, have been written by Duke University faculty.
