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Higher Education News from the Collegiate Way

These news items about residential colleges, collegiate houses, and the renewal of university life are posted for readers of the Collegiate Way website. For more about residential colleges and collegiate universities please visit the main Collegiate Way page.

Collegiate Progress in Pakistan

[Lahore University of Management Sciences] — Earlier this year I noted with pleasure the proposed development of a residential college system at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. I’m delighted to report that LUMS is moving forward rapidly with its residential college plans, and a recent campus-wide social event for students and faculty offered everyone at LUMS a taste (both figuratively and literally, via ice cream) of the benefits of the collegiate way of living.

I had a very nice phone conversation the other day with Dr. Sohaib Kahn, one of the LUMS faculty members who is spearheading the project, and the university’s residential colleges blog continues to post news and views on the latest developments, including a collection of photos from the ice-cream social.

[Banner announcing the residential colleges initiative at the Lahore University of Management Sciences]

Two of the posted pictures give me particular delight:

[“Why not live in place where I can have professors as friends? Why not live in a place with a network of support, advice, love, respect, melodrama, and laughter? Why not live in a place where you feel like a part of something bigger, something deeper, something more? Why not get most you can out of college?”]
[Students at an information table about the proposed residential college system at LUMS]

The quotation on that standing display was written by one of my own residential college students more than a decade ago, and it’s taken from the rotating set that appears on the Collegiate Way’s home page. (You hadn’t noticed? Just refresh the home page a few times and you’ll see a wide variety of quotations about residential college life, many of them from my own former students.)

Little could I have imagined that those local comments, made years before the Collegiate Way website existed (and which I thankfully had the presence of mind to save), would one day appear on the other side of the world to represent the residential college idea as it begins to take root for the first time in a new country.

I envy the wonderful opportunities that everyone at LUMS will have in the coming months as their residential college system begins to take shape, and I wish them continuing success in this important work.

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© Robert J. O’Hara 2000–2021