This has never been a particularly strong aspect of the residence system, and is therefore one of the most heavily addressed aspects of recent redesign efforts. The Task Force Report on Student Life and Learning and related documents have recently brought the concept of community to the attention of the Institute. We shall briefly explain the basic concept of community, though these documents do a much better and more detailed job of describing it. The residence system as it stands is a collection of separate dormitories and independent living groups, all of which are in essence independent from each other. These are also very independent from the larger Institute, the faculty and administrators who interact little if at all with the students' lives outside the classroom.
Community is an ideal very different from what exists currently.
We feel that interacting with many different people with many different perspectives on life is an important part of the MIT experience. True learning, as we see it, is more than simply study, problem sets and lab work. Community is also important because it provides to the faculty, administration and staff of MIT as well as its students. There are conceivably many ways this could be done, some of which are described clearly in the Task Force Report and are reiterated in the design section of this proposal. Therefore any specific goals which are implied by this objective have been left to the remainder of this document.