MSU students and administrators discuss the benefits of a summit held Monday to allow students the chance to comment and answer questions about a plan to reinvent on-campus services.
The plan, called the “neighborhood concept” would reorganize residential areas into different neighborhoods and create a stronger sense of community for students. At Monday’s summit, all students were invited to voice their opinions of the plan.
For Senior Associate Provost June Youatt, the “fresh eyes” of students are the key to success for a facelift to MSU’s residence halls system.
“I keep thinking we might be able to do so much more for students if we just got a different perspective,” said Youatt, who has been a leader in planning a restructure to on-campus living services.
About 40 students showed up Monday night at the Union to share their thoughts and ideas during a summit with administrators about an on-campus housing restructure almost three years in the making. Officials call the vision for the restructure the “neighborhood concept,” which would organize MSU’s campus into six neighborhoods and create a stronger sense of community for students.
The program is expected to pilot in fall 2011 and be implemented by the following year, Youatt said.
Students arrived to discuss the plan and expressed various opinions ranging from unhappiness with cafeteria food to concerns about the potential effect of the concept on off-campus residents.
To finance junior Johnathan Pickett, the student summit was a chance to create change.
“As much time as we all spend complaining about things like (cafeteria) food, these kinds of (events) are important to making changes,” he said.
Neighborhood concept
The on-campus restructure has been discussed by campus officials since fall 2007, but Monday’s summit opened the conversation to the entire student body.
“It’s an opportunity for us to really look critically and creatively at how we provide supportive services for students, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Denise Maybank, senior associate vice president for Student Affairs and Services.
“It’s always about the learning and it’s always about the engagement — identifying ways to be creative and identifying the characteristics of neighborhoods that might come very well from those who live there.”
But just two years ago, nobody had heard the word “neighborhood” used when talking about the restructure, Youatt said. The vision has grown out of the years of discussions between different administrative and governance groups, she said.
Officials hope to see the vision be further molded out of the perspectives offered by the students who attended Monday’s event, Youatt said.
“At each of these tables are members of student-faculty groups who are going to shape what they talk about,” Youatt said.
“I don’t have any doubt that what they’re going to talk about is, ‘Here’s what the students told us.’ So that will be fun.”
The student perspective
Nine tables were set up inside the Union Ballroom, where faculty members took notes as students answered specific questions about nine different aspects of the neighborhood concept.
Topics ranged from creating the neighborhoods to advising undergraduate students to promoting health and wellness. Questions ranged from, “How might we foster a neighborhood identity?” to “What kinds of primary care provided in the neighborhoods would most benefit students?” to “How do we support the cultural transitions of groups within the neighborhoods?”
MSU faculty members laughed as students recalled avoiding the dirty or overcrowded workout facilities in their dormitories and nodded along as others discussed the importance of being guided by peers with shared experiences.
Feedback from students could be the first step toward positive change for students, said human biology senior Crystal Cuevas, who said she hopes the neighborhood concept leads to an easier transition for out-of-state students.
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Cuevas, who came to MSU from New York, said out-of-state students face a specific set of difficulties.
“This could at least lay the groundwork on identifying the problems and maybe could lay groundwork for future endeavors to make changes,” Cuevas said.
Maybank said the student voice is essential in the process of rethinking the residence hall systems.
“The whole objective is to support students, so who better than the students to voice what they need?” Maybank said.
