Faculty Living-Learning Programs
To further enhance the undergraduate experience outside of the colleges and schools, many faculty members are engaged in the residential spaces as live-in residential faculty, faculty affiliated with on-campus residences, first-year dining discussion leaders, and instructors of Learning Where You Live courses. Interactions in these spaces focus primarily on intellectual engagement, cultural understanding, community-building, and wellness. Through planned events and informal interactions, faculty often engage in informal mentoring about the transition to college, academic and career planning, and campus and community resources.
These interactions promote mutual understanding, which help undergraduates feel more connected to and comfortable around faculty, hopefully leading to increased engagement with faculty in the classroom, labs, and during office hours. And participating faculty gain valuable insights into the current undergraduate experience at Cornell.
In partnership with the division of Student and Campus Life, the office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education offers two types of living-learning initiatives: those that are explicitly connected to the undergraduate residences and those that are more closely aligned with the academic experience.
Residential initiatives
North Campus Faculty Programs oversees faculty involvement on North Campus and in the university owned residential communities on South Campus. The primary focus is on the first-year experience with the aims of encouraging intellectual curiosity, risk-taking, and exploration; inspiring learning outside the classroom; unifying and bridging academic specialization to offer a one-university experience; and supporting, advising and mentoring first-year students.
This focus is expanding to include the sophomore experience as the North Campus residential expansion (NCRE) and the newly implemented two-year residency requirement dramatically increases the number of sophomores living in these areas of campus.
There are eight Faculty-in-Residence and approximately 100 Faculty and Community Fellows living in and connected to the undergraduate residencies, respectively. Their involvement includes hosting regular events in the faculty-in-residence apartments, taking students to cultural events on campus, holding special dinner discussions, providing intellectually-focused events in the residences, introducing students to academic resources and the city of Ithaca, and serving as guide/mentor through the many academic firsts (prelims, course enroll, finals, etc.).
The West Campus House System was created by faculty to offer upper-level and transfer students a residential experience with extensive faculty involvement. In the house system, students and faculty gather in a spirit of inquiry and active citizenship, offering students an actively engaged community of their own – one that fosters personal discovery and growth and nurtures scholarship, creativity, and responsible stewardship.
Each of the five houses has a tenured Cornell faculty member living in residence as the House Professor-Dean. They provide programmatic leadership and in partnership with the House Assistant Dean, a trained student affairs administrator, oversee the house’s administration. The House Professor-Dean also leads the 30 faculty and community members serving as House Fellows, non-residential volunteers who interact with residents through meals and events in the building, on campus, and on trips to Ithaca and beyond.
Events in each house includes a weekly house dinner, regular intellectual events in the house professor- dean apartment, interactions with guests of the university staying in the guest apartment, and a variety of programs offered by the house fellows and graduate resident fellows.
Academically connected initiatives
First-year dining discussion programs: In courses primarily geared toward or substantially enrolled by first-year students, this program annually provides approximately twenty instructors with a Cornell Dining plan to facilitate mealtime discussions with small groups of students enrolled in their course. These meals offer an opportunity to discuss course material, explore topics related to the course, and increase students’ comfort interacting with faculty outside of the classroom. For more information, please contact Ethan Stephenson, Director of Faculty Living-Learning Programs at evs24@cornell.edu.
Learning Where You Live (LWYL) courses: LWYL courses are fundamentally different in both form and content from typical courses at Cornell. They are designed to bring faculty and undergraduate students together in comfortable, welcoming settings (often with food in North and West Campus residences) that eliminate the formal barriers of the traditional classroom, foster a sense of “home” and social belonging, encourage sustained interaction between students and faculty, provide students with opportunities to explore topics outside of their intended fields of study, and promote active participation of students in their learning experience. Imbued with a liberal education orientation, LWYL courses are meant to encourage intellectual curiosity, exchange, and exploration in and outside of the classroom as core features and values of a Cornell education.
Typically, LWYL courses are small, carry only one-credit, and are taught on an S/U basis. In this way, they are designed to minimize academic pressure. Each year, there are typically about twenty LWYL courses with total annual enrollments averaging approximately 350 students.
Get Involved
For interested faculty, there are many opportunities to engage with faculty living-learning at Cornell. To inquire, contact Ethan Stephenson, Director of Faculty Living-Learning Programs.