The proposed Fall 2007 expansion of the faculty-in-residence program to West Campus has been pushed back one year, administrators confirmed late last week.
Under the newly proposed schedule, faculty apartments will be installed in Craven, Crowell, Keohane and Kilgo Quadrangles in the summer of 2008 and will result in a loss of approximately 30 to 36 student bed spaces. There is currently a faculty in residence in each of Edens and Few Quadrangles.
"We didn't have enough time to develop the project this year," said Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.
Eddie Hull, dean of residence life and executive director of housing services, said recruitment for the four new positions will begin in the fall and the new faculty in residence will be identified by Thanksgiving.
"By February, we felt that we had really missed the ideal window of recruiting people and decided that the task force would continue looking at the role of the faculty in residence," Hull said.
A task force-consisting of students, faculty members, current program participants and Residence Life and Housing Services representatives-has been formed to make recommendations regarding future changes to the program.
"We will be looking at appropriate incentives, recognitions and rewards for faculty in residence for all schools," Thompson said.
He added that Trinity faculty participants are granted a leave at the end of their three-year term, but ones from other schools are not.
"We want to expand it to more than just [Trinity], maybe [Pratt School of Engineering] faculty won't get a leave but some other form of compensation or recognition," Thompson said.
The task force will also look at how to apply the East Campus program on West.
"We want to find connections between faculty and students, bridging classroom interactions and outside interactions," Thompson said. "We're trying to build on what we've accomplished previously."
All East faculty in residence are also pre-major advisors.
"It's different and hard to figure out how best to make it work, but it won't be the same," Thompson said. "It's probably more programmatic. Maybe we'll have an academic program for sophomores where the faculty in residence will organize speakers around main topics."
Administrators said they hope to improve faculty-student interaction by expanding the program.
"Duke is incredibly fortunate to have the kind of resources to support this kind of program," Hull said. "We have some incredibly talented and compassionate faculty members who truly understand the student experience and seek to make it better."
Thompson added that because the University does not have a college-residential model like many other universities, the faculty-in-residence program can help connect students' academic and social lives.
"This is a way we could acquire and achieve some of the activities those residential college models do so well," he said. "We're looking for natural ways to bridge academic and social residential life."
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