An Important New Book on Residential Colleges
Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way
6 June 2001 (collegiateway.org) — One of the world’s leading authorities on residential colleges is Dr. Mark Ryan, who was for many years the Dean of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale University and is now Regent of Colegio José Gaos at the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico. In connection with Yale’s 300th anniversary celebration this year, Mark has just published a collection of his essays on residential colleges under the title A Collegiate Way of Living: Residential Colleges and a Yale Education. This volume will be available within the next couple of weeks, and I will post ordering information as soon as it is available. If you buy only one book this year about residential colleges, this will be the one to get.
(A literary note: Mark and I both take our titles from a comment made by Cotton Mather in 1701 which was later taken up by the historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Frederick Rudolph. In recounting the early history of Harvard College as a residential institution, Mather noted that while “’tis true, the University of Upsal in Sueden, hath ordinarily about seven or eight Hundred Students belonging to it, which do none of them live Collegiately, but board all of them here and there at Private Houses; nevertheless the Government of New-England, was for having their Students brought up in a more Collegiate Way of Living.”)
Update · 19 June 2008: Mark Ryan’s A Collegiate Way of Living is now available online in an expertly-produced pdf edition.
