Background
How we got to here. 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 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 have brought this question into sharper relief. It is now time for a group of students, faculty and staff 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?
