If you think that universities only need to build buildings to house students you can ignore A Pattern Language . If you think that universities need to build rich, diverse, and supportive academic communities for their students then you can't afford to miss it. The residential college idea is often mentioned in passing in more general works on higher education. The young may enjoy themselves on campus, they may in fact do a great deal of growing up while away at college, they may even learn a lot, but for the most part they don't truly interact with the academic world. The failure to draw the young into a community of learning is a failure of what has traditionally been called a liberal education.
Liberal education is elusive, as much a matter of style as of substance.
It has little to do with the persistence on campus of liberal arts subject matter. Indeed, in the large research university the liberal arts college is often just a variant trade school, which turns out historians to take up teaching posts in history just as the business school churns out economists or the pharmacy school churns out pharmacists. The liberal arts, the humanities, do not really come to life without the liberal arts style, and the liberal arts style in education is one that engages and enflames a person's individuality and desires within the framework of some purposive community of learning. It has sometimes been observed that higher education, technically advanced education, is able to make a nuclear bomb or some other weapon of mass destruction, but that only a liberal education provides the means to decide whether to use such weapons. This is not, of course, because liberal education gives people a specific kind of information, but rather because it gives them the framework, the mucilage to hold together the information they do possess.