It's taken three decades, but the rest of the Ivy League is finally ready to follow Harvard's move to the residential House system.

While student independence was the watchword of the 1960s, many college officials say that the recent trend is to bolster student-faculty ties.

"There is a big concern among some colleges to insure that the living facilities are more than dooms--that they are not places for students to retreat from academic life, but that they serve as bridges to the [academic] departments," said Associate Dean of Housing Thomas A. Dingman '67, who recently attended a series of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford to discuss aspects of residential life with officials of other colleges.

"In the late '60s and early '70s there was a more lively curiosity on the part of students to play around with new ideas, and to experiment intellectually. Now the tendency is to look for more secure learning situations," said Norman W. Robinson, associate dean for student affairs at Stanford University, who also attended the meeting.

"I remember living in the houses when you couldn't come to dinner without a coat and tie," recalls Stanley N. Katz '55, now a professor at Princeton University and a master of one of the residential colleges. "One day a guy came into the dining hall wearing a jacket and tie and nothing else. I knew then that they weren't going to be able to keep that standard any more," he says.

Now the goal is to try to "stimulate students" by making the residential colleges places "conducive to lively debate and intellectual discussion," Robinson says.

While Harvard in 1930 was the first American university to institute the Oxford-Cambridge system of smaller colleges within the university--each with its own master, resident faculty members, and advisers, many colleges today are adopting similar systems.

"There's a feeling among many people that what got Harvard through the 1960's was the house system. It bridged the gulf between the faculty and students. How other schools are trying to create the same opportunity for that mix by building communities within the larger university community," Dingman says.

"Harvard's model provides an ideal which has worked extremely well," Robinson says, but adds that copying the system may be a mistake because of a "lack of money or physical arrangements to do it."

Whether they are adopting the entire House system or just the philosophy of bolstering the dorm-classroom connection, several Ivy League colleges are now spending substantial amounts of time, money and people on improving residential life.

Princeton: Five Colleges for Underclassmen

At Princeton, Katz points to several factors leading to the adoption of the residential colleges including the increased number of students enrolled at the university, and the desire to be more competitive in attracting students.

"The problem was obvious. Common areas designed for 500-700 students were being used by 2500--it was uncivilized and unmanageable. Students missed out on the benefits of undergraduate college life, including closer contact with faculty members," he says. Katz also points to the faculty's desire to create a more egalitarian atmosphere because Princeton students, after their sophomore year, join selective eating clubs. "We wanted all the students to have some kind of integrated experience," he says.

The Princeton system, now in its first year of full operation, includes five residential colleges, each with its own support network of advisors. Unlike the Harvard Houses, Princeton's colleges house only freshmen and sophomores with a few upperclassmen advisers. While they borrowed the practice of assigning freshmen to a house from Yale, many of the other aspects of the Princeton system were modeled after Harvard, Katz says.

With still a few problems to iron out, such as the incorporation of upperclassmen, the Princeton system has been labelled a success. Citing increased acceptances of high students as evidence, Katz says, "This is the first year we've had equal splits with Yale in the number of students who decided to come. (The college system) has made us more competitive for the kind of students I want."