Background
The origin of the neighborhood concept at Stanford. In 2019, the ResX Task Force determined that the guiding concept for the Stanford residential community should be the “neighborhood,” and it drew particular attention to the importance of continuity in the neighborhood experience: “Each neighborhood will foster continuity during students’ four years at Stanford, allowing them to experience deepening friendships over time, as well as offering the creative challenges and rich learning opportunities that come from citizenship in a diverse community.”
Fostering Student Choice
At the same time, the ResX Task Force signaled that this vision could pose challenges considering Stanford’s longstanding approach of fostering student choice, and the report includes a discussion of “how we can create a neighborhood system that allows for enough freedom for students to choose a personally meaningful path but within a stable community that offers an abiding sense of belonging.” The first two years of ResX implementation brought this question into sharper relief. In 2023, a new group of students, faculty, and staff known as the Neighborhoods Task Force was appointed to explicitly take this up to inform the next phases of neighborhood implementation...
What is the optimal balance between student choice and fostering community cohesion as we seek to realize the full potential of the residential experience for our diverse students?
