April 23, 2025 • 18 mins
The college dormitory is an American tradition, though it hasn’t always been necessary for education. Carla Yanni tells us why the dorm has become a feature of campus architecture since the 17th century.
References mentioned this episode:
- Carla Yanni. 2019. Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. University of Minnesota Press.
- Carla Yanni’s faculty page
Support the show at patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
Get in touch. Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Lauren Shepherd (00:14):
Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, A
History of Higher Education.
I'm Lauren Lassabe Shepherd.
On today's episode, we'rediscussing the architecture of
college dormitories in theUnited States from the 18th
century to the mid-20th century.
For this discussion, I'm happyto welcome Carla Yanni,
Distinguished Professor of ArtHistory and Director of
(00:34):
Architectural Studies at RutgersUniversity.
She is the author of threeacademic monographs, each one a
social history of a singlebuilding type, including
psychiatric hospitals, museums,and for our purposes today,
student residence halls.
Professor Yanni, it's apleasure to have you.
Thank you for inviting me.
The book opens with a fantasticprovocation.
(00:56):
You ask, why have Americansbelieved for so long that
college students should residein dormitories? You explain that
the dorm living arrangement wasnever inevitable or even
necessary.
So why have residence hallsbecome such a standard feature
on our campuses?
Carla Yanni (01:15):
There's a way in which people know by common
sense that they don't need tolive in the residence hall.
We know that commuters geteducated somehow and we know
that people who attend communitycolleges become educated.
The ancient universities ofEurope...
Uppsala and Bologna to begin,they didn't provide housing for
(01:40):
the students.
Oxford and Cambridge did, butOxford and Cambridge were the
exception rather than the rule.
What I argue in the book is thatfor Americans, the early
colleges...
Many of them were remote.
They were small.
They were aimed at a particularreligious group, you know, a
(02:02):
small group withinProtestantism.
And they needed to providedormitories because there wasn't
enough room in the town.
Let's say, to take the exampleof Dickinson College in the
middle of Pennsylvania, therejust weren't any d boarding
houses for the students to livein so they had to build
residence halls.
So that's one answer.
(02:24):
Another answer is that goingback to the 18th century, for
example, Benjamin Franklin, whowas one of the founders of the
University of Pennsylvania,pointed out that given that what
would soon become the UnitedStates, given that the colonies
didn't have an aristocracy,really, it wasn't so easy for
(02:46):
the upper class boys and girlsto meet one another.
So he commented that going tocollege was an opportunity for
boys to excel in business.
And he said marriages, by whichhe meant that a boy would marry
his roommate's younger sister.
That was the sort of standardcolonial era trope.
(03:09):
And then I think the other partof the answer is that when
Americans take on Britishisms,they tend to overdo it and make
them bigger and grander than theBritish ever would have.
So when Americans looked atOxford and Cambridge and saw the
advantages of people livingtogether in residential
colleges, they wanted to imitatethat.
Lauren Shepherd (03:31):
I love the line that you have early on.
This is something I didn't knowabout the standard quadrangle,
right?
Which I think we all think ofas just like an inherent, like
if we're picturing a college,we're picturing a quadrangle.
That was an invention of the1920s.
That was something that Ididn't realize, or at least not
an invention of the 1920s, butits heyday was sort of the 20s
(03:54):
and 30s.
So it's so interesting to seehow these architectural styles
are periodized.
Carla Yanni (03:58):
Yeah, the quadrangle is unfortunately a, a
word with two very distinctmeanings in architectural
history.
It can either mean a lawn, arectangular lawn surrounded by
buildings.
So that would be Rutgers sortof has that University of
Rochester has a great example ofthat, but that's so that people
(04:19):
refer to that as the quad, butthey're really talking about the
space between the buildings.
The other use of the wordquadrangle is a square donut.
So it's a four sided buildingwith a courtyard in the middle.
And that can be traced back tomedieval monasteries and then
from medieval monasteries tomedieval colleges.
And yes, it became very, verypopular in the 1920s in the
(04:43):
U.S., although there areexamples before that.
But that was a time period whencollege builders were
particularly entranced by Oxfordand Cambridge, which most of
the colleges are made up of aseries of attached quadrangles.
Lauren Shepherd (04:56):
Can you talk about how the dormitories were
constructed as social spaces asmuch as educational spaces?
You sort of mentioned that asecond ago when you mentioned
Franklin.
But I'm curious, how have thephysical layouts of the
residence halls sort of shapedour notions of education, class,
gender, race?
And as you point out, evencitizenship, they've been like
inclusive and also exclusionary.
(05:19):
So can you talk about some ofthose inconsistencies?
Carla Yanni (05:22):
That's the overarching theme of the book in
many ways is that collegedormitories could be both
exclusive and inclusive,although they were always
claimed to be a place forfellowship and sociability and
gathering.
The idea that students need tointeract with each other outside
(05:45):
the classroom is related to theidea that college is a
transition between adolescenceand adulthood.
It is a time for young peopleto move out of their comfort
zones, meet people who aredifferent from them, have a way
(06:07):
in which they're forging theirown path.
And the college residence hallis a sort of transitional space
between living at home andliving out in the world.
At least that's the way it Itwas for decades.
The profession of studentaffairs, which began in the 19th
(06:28):
century with deans of women whowere employed at co-educational
schools, colleges to take careof female students.
So the deans of women Thenthere were deans of men and then
later on the two offices wouldbe combined and it would be
called student affairs.
But for deans of women, it wasextraordinarily important to
(06:51):
build dormitories because thatwas a way they could keep the
women students safe.
physically safe, but also interms of their reputation and
their marriageability and soforth.
Because even though they werein college, the expectation is
that they were going to becomewives and mothers.
(07:11):
A student affairs professionaltoday will say, well, the
students are only in class 20hours a week.
Who's looking out for them therest of the time?
So for Americans, thecollegiate experience, the whole
student, the overall experienceof being at college is is a far
(07:32):
more commonplace part of therhetoric that comes from
colleges than in most Europeancountries.
They go to school for theacademics, right?
There's not the sportscomplexes.
Fraternities and parties arerelatively rare and so forth.
Lauren Shepherd (07:51):
Is there an anecdote or two that you'd like
to share from the book or someof your other recent research?
Carla Yanni (07:57):
Yes.
I mean, people frequently askme if I'm in favor of residence
halls or not.
I mean, the tone of the bookcan be a little bit detached in
arm's length.
People made a lot of claimsthat dormitories would build
character in And I don't see anyevidence of that.
(08:18):
I see plenty of people whosecharacters were worse off after
a year in the freshman dorm.
But in the end, I am in favorof residence halls.
I do think the experience thatstudents have outside the
classroom is extraordinarilyimportant.
And I do think, especially forworking class and middle class
(08:40):
students, the networking thatyou gain at college That's hard
to put a price on.
If you're home in your livingroom taking asynchronous online
classes, you are not going tomake a lifelong friend that you
start a business with, right?
I mean, I think that thecollegiate experience is good
(09:00):
for young people.
I would want my son to live ina residence hall.
And I didn't have anopportunity to put this in the
book because it didn't come upuntil after I'd published the
book and I was doing a booksigning in New York City.
And there were two people inthe audience who I knew from
other parts of my life, but Ihad no idea that they had this
(09:21):
connection.
So I gave my presentation andwe talked about some of the
things that you and I havetalked about, about sociability,
about meeting people, aboutcasual interactions that can
happen in a residence hall.
And one of the women in theaudience, a friend of mine who
taught art history at Juilliardfor college, 40 years, long
(09:43):
time.
She said that Juilliard, whenshe first started at Juilliard,
they didn't have a dorm.
They did not have a residencehall.
And the dance majors usedrecorded music for their final
dance performances.
And then once they built theresidence hall, the dancers met
the musicians and the dancershad live music at their dance
(10:05):
performances.
And that just seemed like theperfect example.
And then my other friend in theaudience said, oh, I worked on
that building.
He's an architect.
Lauren Shepherd (10:13):
Oh, wow.
Carla Yanni (10:14):
Great moment.
Lauren Shepherd (10:15):
Yeah, the world is a small place sometimes.
Well, I'm glad that you broughtup the idea of being physically
on campus and some of theadvantages that that brings.
So, I mean, do you have anythoughts in our post-2020?
I'm laughing because Professor
Carla Yanni (10:34):
Yanni just rolled her eyes.
Well, I see this as a parentand as a teacher and as a
scholar of colleges.
I'd love your thoughts.
I think that one proof that mybook is correct about the
importance of sociability andnetworking is the number of
(10:55):
wealthy small colleges thatallowed students to come back to
campus or forced them to comeback to campus in the middle of
the pandemic.
And then they took onlineclasses.
That is a message that livingin the dorm matters.
Making friends matters.
Belonging to a club matters.
And I'm talking about Wesleyanand Hamilton.
(11:19):
These are expensive smallcolleges.
So that tells you thatnetworking is a big piece of why
people go to college and whythe people who make what at the
time were life and deathdecisions about colleges made
the decisions they did.
Rutgers was incredibly strict.
They wanted everyone vaccinatedand they didn't want people
(11:39):
back on campus.
The rise of asynchronousteaching in my view, while not
disastrous, is going to open upan even wider gulf between the
haves and the have-nots in theworld of the academy.
So poorer students will stayhome, they'll commute, they'll
(12:00):
take everything asynchronouslyonline, they won't meet anybody,
they'll have a pretty mediocreexperience, they'll have limited
contact with their teachers,and They might end up with a
degree that has a name on it,but I don't think the experience
of that learning will be astransformational as if they had
(12:26):
been there in person.
Lauren Shepherd (12:28):
And I think that speaks to the move that
administrators are just likeconceding about college
education is credentialism,right?
Get your degree and that's allit's about.
It's just about the diploma ortake these modules, get these
micro
Carla Yanni (12:44):
credentials.
That's another way ofseparating the haves and the
have nots, right?
So wealthy families who havegenerations of wealth and
generations of people who wentto college will say, to their
teenage kid, go to Wellesley, goto Davidson, go to Pomona, go
(13:05):
to a school that doesn't haverequirements like Brown or
Wesleyan.
Explore, have fun, follow yourdreams.
And nobody else is going to saythat.
Middle class and working classpeople will say, go get a degree
and get a job.
As quickly as you can.
Quickly as possible.
Lauren Shepherd (13:23):
Right.
Yeah.
I'm also thinking too about howsome of the more elite schools
were able to require theirstudents to return to campus.
So that's assuming that theydon't have, you know, family
care responsibilities.
The institution has theresources to provide vaccines
and testing and to be able toquarantine hundreds of young
women at women's schools or, you
Carla Yanni (13:46):
know, I guess.
Some places had a swing dorm.
They had a whole extra dorm.
And when people got COVID, theymoved them to the quarantine.
I mean, Rutgers has never hadextra dorm space and never will.
Gosh.
Lauren Shepherd (13:58):
I also think too, this may be getting a
little far afield of ourconversation, but I also suspect
that a lot of thoseinstitutions had contracts with
their, you know, because a lotof the dorm management is
managed by outside companies,the same way apartments are.
And I wonder if there werecontractual requirements that
(14:19):
forced people to come back tocampus.
Carla Yanni (14:21):
Yeah.
Unknown (14:22):
Yeah.
Carla Yanni (14:23):
My experience suggests that the residence
halls that are owned by theuniversities are usually run by
the university itself, but it'slike a silo within the
university where they areexpected to be a money-making
portion of the university.
And they count on that income.
In that sense, I agree withwhat you just said, but I don't
(14:44):
think it's that they would havea contract with an exterior
developer or something likethat.
Lauren Shepherd (14:49):
I wonder too, just to stay on the COVID topic
for one more moment, do you see,I don't know if you've, surely
you've kept up with newconstruction.
Have you seen any new patternsin maybe dormitories that have
been built since 2020?
Or maybe those that have beenretrofitted in different ways?
Carla Yanni (15:09):
Well, I have many friends in architectural history
who study, as I do, theincredibly unglamorous topic of
ventilation.
So we've been looking atventilation for a long time.
And then there was like thissix month period when
ventilation was cool and peoplewere interested in things like
opening the windows.
(15:30):
I see what you did there.
I mean, it's over.
It's the moment of peoplecaring about ventilation is
already gone.
People have gone right back tobuilding whatever they were
building in 2019.
Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd (15:42):
Out of habit or because of the expense or
because it's just revolutionary?
Carla Yanni (15:46):
All of the above.
Habit, expense.
This is the way they've alwaysdone it.
Big architecture firms don'tdesign every new building from
scratch.
They pull a similar buildingout of the cloud and tweak it a
little bit for its new site.
Unknown (16:03):
Right.
Carla Yanni (16:04):
Before there was mechanical ventilation,
architects had to think long andhard about how to ventilate
buildings like prisons andhospitals and psychiatric
hospitals and dormitories,because they knew that disease
spread quickly.
in confined spaces and theythought that diseases spread in
clouds of bad air calledmiasmas.
(16:26):
So they didn't know aboutgerms.
Let's say this is before the1870s, but they weren't wrong
about the clouds of bad air,right?
If 10 people who havetuberculosis are all breathing
out in the same room and there'sno way for that air to escape,
it is more likely that otherpeople in that room will catch
tuberculosis.
So they knew that.
And they were very concernedabout communicative diseases.
(16:49):
Anyone in the 19th century wholived longer than 20 years had
to have lived through apandemic.
I mean, there was typhus, therewas cholera.
It was constant.
It was a part of their lives.
And architects took ventilationvery seriously.
And then with mechanicalventilation in the 20th century,
it sort of stopped beingsomething that seen that it was
(17:10):
something that an engineer or anHVAC person would do.
It wasn't built into thearchitecture.
Lauren Shepherd (17:17):
This has been such an interesting history.
I have really appreciated thisdiscussion.
And how can listeners keep upwith your work?
Carla Yanni (17:25):
Well, my Rutgers website is the best place.
I keep that pretty up to date.
And I have a name that's easyto Google.
When you Google it, you get me.
So far, I'm the only one.
So yeah, I'd be happy to hearfrom listeners who have further
questions or want to follow up.
Lauren Shepherd (17:45):
Are you working on another project now
Carla Yanni (17:47):
that you want to share?
I'm writing about, with acolleague, a history of the
geology museum at Rutgers.
Oh, wow.
That kind of Combines some ofmy interests.
I'd written about museumspreviously, and I'm interested
in the history of science.
And we have a very interestinggeology museum that was
(18:08):
connected to the land grantbecause geologists study soil
and they study fertilizer.
So having a geology museum wasrelated to teaching farmers how
to increase their crop yields.
Lauren Shepherd (18:24):
Fantastic.
I would love to have you back.
I know that the project mightbe a ways out, but I'd love to
have you back for thatdiscussion.
We haven't done a land grantepisode yet.
Oh, I'd
Carla Yanni (18:34):
love to say about that.
Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd (18:37):
Well, thank you very much, Professor Yanni.
Pleasure to meet you, Lauren.
For listeners, I'll drop a linkto Dr.
Yanni's book, Living on Campus,in the show notes.
If you enjoyed the episode, besure to subscribe, share with
colleagues and friends, andleave a review.
Thanks for listening to theAmerican Campus Podcast.
Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, A
History of Higher Education.
I'm Lauren Lassabe Shepherd.
On today's episode, we'rediscussing the architecture of
college dormitories in theUnited States from the 18th
century to the mid-20th century.
For this discussion, I'm happyto welcome Carla Yanni,
Distinguished Professor of ArtHistory and Director of
(00:34):
Architectural Studies at RutgersUniversity.
She is the author of threeacademic monographs, each one a
social history of a singlebuilding type, including
psychiatric hospitals, museums,and for our purposes today,
student residence halls.
Professor Yanni, it's apleasure to have you.
Thank you for inviting me.
The book opens with a fantasticprovocation.
(00:56):
You ask, why have Americansbelieved for so long that
college students should residein dormitories? You explain that
the dorm living arrangement wasnever inevitable or even
necessary.
So why have residence hallsbecome such a standard feature
on our campuses?
Carla Yanni (01:15):
There's a way in which people know by common
sense that they don't need tolive in the residence hall.
We know that commuters geteducated somehow and we know
that people who attend communitycolleges become educated.
The ancient universities ofEurope...
Uppsala and Bologna to begin,they didn't provide housing for
(01:40):
the students.
Oxford and Cambridge did, butOxford and Cambridge were the
exception rather than the rule.
What I argue in the book is thatfor Americans, the early
colleges...
Many of them were remote.
They were small.
They were aimed at a particularreligious group, you know, a
(02:02):
small group withinProtestantism.
And they needed to providedormitories because there wasn't
enough room in the town.
Let's say, to take the exampleof Dickinson College in the
middle of Pennsylvania, therejust weren't any d boarding
houses for the students to livein so they had to build
residence halls.
So that's one answer.
(02:24):
Another answer is that goingback to the 18th century, for
example, Benjamin Franklin, whowas one of the founders of the
University of Pennsylvania,pointed out that given that what
would soon become the UnitedStates, given that the colonies
didn't have an aristocracy,really, it wasn't so easy for
(02:46):
the upper class boys and girlsto meet one another.
So he commented that going tocollege was an opportunity for
boys to excel in business.
And he said marriages, by whichhe meant that a boy would marry
his roommate's younger sister.
That was the sort of standardcolonial era trope.
(03:09):
And then I think the other partof the answer is that when
Americans take on Britishisms,they tend to overdo it and make
them bigger and grander than theBritish ever would have.
So when Americans looked atOxford and Cambridge and saw the
advantages of people livingtogether in residential
colleges, they wanted to imitatethat.
Lauren Shepherd (03:31):
I love the line that you have early on.
This is something I didn't knowabout the standard quadrangle,
right?
Which I think we all think ofas just like an inherent, like
if we're picturing a college,we're picturing a quadrangle.
That was an invention of the1920s.
That was something that Ididn't realize, or at least not
an invention of the 1920s, butits heyday was sort of the 20s
(03:54):
and 30s.
So it's so interesting to seehow these architectural styles
are periodized.
Carla Yanni (03:58):
Yeah, the quadrangle is unfortunately a, a
word with two very distinctmeanings in architectural
history.
It can either mean a lawn, arectangular lawn surrounded by
buildings.
So that would be Rutgers sortof has that University of
Rochester has a great example ofthat, but that's so that people
(04:19):
refer to that as the quad, butthey're really talking about the
space between the buildings.
The other use of the wordquadrangle is a square donut.
So it's a four sided buildingwith a courtyard in the middle.
And that can be traced back tomedieval monasteries and then
from medieval monasteries tomedieval colleges.
And yes, it became very, verypopular in the 1920s in the
(04:43):
U.S., although there areexamples before that.
But that was a time period whencollege builders were
particularly entranced by Oxfordand Cambridge, which most of
the colleges are made up of aseries of attached quadrangles.
Lauren Shepherd (04:56):
Can you talk about how the dormitories were
constructed as social spaces asmuch as educational spaces?
You sort of mentioned that asecond ago when you mentioned
Franklin.
But I'm curious, how have thephysical layouts of the
residence halls sort of shapedour notions of education, class,
gender, race?
And as you point out, evencitizenship, they've been like
inclusive and also exclusionary.
(05:19):
So can you talk about some ofthose inconsistencies?
Carla Yanni (05:22):
That's the overarching theme of the book in
many ways is that collegedormitories could be both
exclusive and inclusive,although they were always
claimed to be a place forfellowship and sociability and
gathering.
The idea that students need tointeract with each other outside
(05:45):
the classroom is related to theidea that college is a
transition between adolescenceand adulthood.
It is a time for young peopleto move out of their comfort
zones, meet people who aredifferent from them, have a way
(06:07):
in which they're forging theirown path.
And the college residence hallis a sort of transitional space
between living at home andliving out in the world.
At least that's the way it Itwas for decades.
The profession of studentaffairs, which began in the 19th
(06:28):
century with deans of women whowere employed at co-educational
schools, colleges to take careof female students.
So the deans of women Thenthere were deans of men and then
later on the two offices wouldbe combined and it would be
called student affairs.
But for deans of women, it wasextraordinarily important to
(06:51):
build dormitories because thatwas a way they could keep the
women students safe.
physically safe, but also interms of their reputation and
their marriageability and soforth.
Because even though they werein college, the expectation is
that they were going to becomewives and mothers.
(07:11):
A student affairs professionaltoday will say, well, the
students are only in class 20hours a week.
Who's looking out for them therest of the time?
So for Americans, thecollegiate experience, the whole
student, the overall experienceof being at college is is a far
(07:32):
more commonplace part of therhetoric that comes from
colleges than in most Europeancountries.
They go to school for theacademics, right?
There's not the sportscomplexes.
Fraternities and parties arerelatively rare and so forth.
Lauren Shepherd (07:51):
Is there an anecdote or two that you'd like
to share from the book or someof your other recent research?
Carla Yanni (07:57):
Yes.
I mean, people frequently askme if I'm in favor of residence
halls or not.
I mean, the tone of the bookcan be a little bit detached in
arm's length.
People made a lot of claimsthat dormitories would build
character in And I don't see anyevidence of that.
(08:18):
I see plenty of people whosecharacters were worse off after
a year in the freshman dorm.
But in the end, I am in favorof residence halls.
I do think the experience thatstudents have outside the
classroom is extraordinarilyimportant.
And I do think, especially forworking class and middle class
(08:40):
students, the networking thatyou gain at college That's hard
to put a price on.
If you're home in your livingroom taking asynchronous online
classes, you are not going tomake a lifelong friend that you
start a business with, right?
I mean, I think that thecollegiate experience is good
(09:00):
for young people.
I would want my son to live ina residence hall.
And I didn't have anopportunity to put this in the
book because it didn't come upuntil after I'd published the
book and I was doing a booksigning in New York City.
And there were two people inthe audience who I knew from
other parts of my life, but Ihad no idea that they had this
(09:21):
connection.
So I gave my presentation andwe talked about some of the
things that you and I havetalked about, about sociability,
about meeting people, aboutcasual interactions that can
happen in a residence hall.
And one of the women in theaudience, a friend of mine who
taught art history at Juilliardfor college, 40 years, long
(09:43):
time.
She said that Juilliard, whenshe first started at Juilliard,
they didn't have a dorm.
They did not have a residencehall.
And the dance majors usedrecorded music for their final
dance performances.
And then once they built theresidence hall, the dancers met
the musicians and the dancershad live music at their dance
(10:05):
performances.
And that just seemed like theperfect example.
And then my other friend in theaudience said, oh, I worked on
that building.
He's an architect.
Lauren Shepherd (10:13):
Oh, wow.
Carla Yanni (10:14):
Great moment.
Lauren Shepherd (10:15):
Yeah, the world is a small place sometimes.
Well, I'm glad that you broughtup the idea of being physically
on campus and some of theadvantages that that brings.
So, I mean, do you have anythoughts in our post-2020?
I'm laughing because Professor
Carla Yanni (10:34):
Yanni just rolled her eyes.
Well, I see this as a parentand as a teacher and as a
scholar of colleges.
I'd love your thoughts.
I think that one proof that mybook is correct about the
importance of sociability andnetworking is the number of
(10:55):
wealthy small colleges thatallowed students to come back to
campus or forced them to comeback to campus in the middle of
the pandemic.
And then they took onlineclasses.
That is a message that livingin the dorm matters.
Making friends matters.
Belonging to a club matters.
And I'm talking about Wesleyanand Hamilton.
(11:19):
These are expensive smallcolleges.
So that tells you thatnetworking is a big piece of why
people go to college and whythe people who make what at the
time were life and deathdecisions about colleges made
the decisions they did.
Rutgers was incredibly strict.
They wanted everyone vaccinatedand they didn't want people
(11:39):
back on campus.
The rise of asynchronousteaching in my view, while not
disastrous, is going to open upan even wider gulf between the
haves and the have-nots in theworld of the academy.
So poorer students will stayhome, they'll commute, they'll
(12:00):
take everything asynchronouslyonline, they won't meet anybody,
they'll have a pretty mediocreexperience, they'll have limited
contact with their teachers,and They might end up with a
degree that has a name on it,but I don't think the experience
of that learning will be astransformational as if they had
(12:26):
been there in person.
Lauren Shepherd (12:28):
And I think that speaks to the move that
administrators are just likeconceding about college
education is credentialism,right?
Get your degree and that's allit's about.
It's just about the diploma ortake these modules, get these
micro
Carla Yanni (12:44):
credentials.
That's another way ofseparating the haves and the
have nots, right?
So wealthy families who havegenerations of wealth and
generations of people who wentto college will say, to their
teenage kid, go to Wellesley, goto Davidson, go to Pomona, go
(13:05):
to a school that doesn't haverequirements like Brown or
Wesleyan.
Explore, have fun, follow yourdreams.
And nobody else is going to saythat.
Middle class and working classpeople will say, go get a degree
and get a job.
As quickly as you can.
Quickly as possible.
Lauren Shepherd (13:23):
Right.
Yeah.
I'm also thinking too about howsome of the more elite schools
were able to require theirstudents to return to campus.
So that's assuming that theydon't have, you know, family
care responsibilities.
The institution has theresources to provide vaccines
and testing and to be able toquarantine hundreds of young
women at women's schools or, you
Carla Yanni (13:46):
know, I guess.
Some places had a swing dorm.
They had a whole extra dorm.
And when people got COVID, theymoved them to the quarantine.
I mean, Rutgers has never hadextra dorm space and never will.
Gosh.
Lauren Shepherd (13:58):
I also think too, this may be getting a
little far afield of ourconversation, but I also suspect
that a lot of thoseinstitutions had contracts with
their, you know, because a lotof the dorm management is
managed by outside companies,the same way apartments are.
And I wonder if there werecontractual requirements that
(14:19):
forced people to come back tocampus.
Carla Yanni (14:21):
Yeah.
Unknown (14:22):
Yeah.
Carla Yanni (14:23):
My experience suggests that the residence
halls that are owned by theuniversities are usually run by
the university itself, but it'slike a silo within the
university where they areexpected to be a money-making
portion of the university.
And they count on that income.
In that sense, I agree withwhat you just said, but I don't
(14:44):
think it's that they would havea contract with an exterior
developer or something likethat.
Lauren Shepherd (14:49):
I wonder too, just to stay on the COVID topic
for one more moment, do you see,I don't know if you've, surely
you've kept up with newconstruction.
Have you seen any new patternsin maybe dormitories that have
been built since 2020?
Or maybe those that have beenretrofitted in different ways?
Carla Yanni (15:09):
Well, I have many friends in architectural history
who study, as I do, theincredibly unglamorous topic of
ventilation.
So we've been looking atventilation for a long time.
And then there was like thissix month period when
ventilation was cool and peoplewere interested in things like
opening the windows.
(15:30):
I see what you did there.
I mean, it's over.
It's the moment of peoplecaring about ventilation is
already gone.
People have gone right back tobuilding whatever they were
building in 2019.
Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd (15:42):
Out of habit or because of the expense or
because it's just revolutionary?
Carla Yanni (15:46):
All of the above.
Habit, expense.
This is the way they've alwaysdone it.
Big architecture firms don'tdesign every new building from
scratch.
They pull a similar buildingout of the cloud and tweak it a
little bit for its new site.
Unknown (16:03):
Right.
Carla Yanni (16:04):
Before there was mechanical ventilation,
architects had to think long andhard about how to ventilate
buildings like prisons andhospitals and psychiatric
hospitals and dormitories,because they knew that disease
spread quickly.
in confined spaces and theythought that diseases spread in
clouds of bad air calledmiasmas.
(16:26):
So they didn't know aboutgerms.
Let's say this is before the1870s, but they weren't wrong
about the clouds of bad air,right?
If 10 people who havetuberculosis are all breathing
out in the same room and there'sno way for that air to escape,
it is more likely that otherpeople in that room will catch
tuberculosis.
So they knew that.
And they were very concernedabout communicative diseases.
(16:49):
Anyone in the 19th century wholived longer than 20 years had
to have lived through apandemic.
I mean, there was typhus, therewas cholera.
It was constant.
It was a part of their lives.
And architects took ventilationvery seriously.
And then with mechanicalventilation in the 20th century,
it sort of stopped beingsomething that seen that it was
(17:10):
something that an engineer or anHVAC person would do.
It wasn't built into thearchitecture.
Lauren Shepherd (17:17):
This has been such an interesting history.
I have really appreciated thisdiscussion.
And how can listeners keep upwith your work?
Carla Yanni (17:25):
Well, my Rutgers website is the best place.
I keep that pretty up to date.
And I have a name that's easyto Google.
When you Google it, you get me.
So far, I'm the only one.
So yeah, I'd be happy to hearfrom listeners who have further
questions or want to follow up.
Lauren Shepherd (17:45):
Are you working on another project now
Carla Yanni (17:47):
that you want to share?
I'm writing about, with acolleague, a history of the
geology museum at Rutgers.
Oh, wow.
That kind of Combines some ofmy interests.
I'd written about museumspreviously, and I'm interested
in the history of science.
And we have a very interestinggeology museum that was
(18:08):
connected to the land grantbecause geologists study soil
and they study fertilizer.
So having a geology museum wasrelated to teaching farmers how
to increase their crop yields.
Lauren Shepherd (18:24):
Fantastic.
I would love to have you back.
I know that the project mightbe a ways out, but I'd love to
have you back for thatdiscussion.
We haven't done a land grantepisode yet.
Oh, I'd
Carla Yanni (18:34):
love to say about that.
Yeah.
Lauren Shepherd (18:37):
Well, thank you very much, Professor Yanni.
Pleasure to meet you, Lauren.
For listeners, I'll drop a linkto Dr.
Yanni's book, Living on Campus,in the show notes.
If you enjoyed the episode, besure to subscribe, share with
colleagues and friends, andleave a review.
Thanks for listening to theAmerican Campus Podcast.
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