Experience shows, however, that many faculty will readily participate in collegiate life and will often revel in it. New faculty in particular, just like new students, find membership in a college to be especially valuable to them. It made me feel like I was part of the community. It would be extremely simple to create a system of incentives having to do with parking, dining, advising, university service, and various other functions that would encourage faculty involvement in residential colleges. This is an untested idea.
More research is needed before it can be adopted.
It has been tested for 700 years. While educational research for its own sake can always be interesting, practical solutions to the poverty of campus life, solutions that are clear and that can be easily implemented, are needed now. Those solutions are at hand in residential colleges, and a residential college can be created in an existing dormitory with only one year of advance planning. Residential colleges may be fine for ancient and wealthy elite schools like Harvard, but not for my state university. Students don't want to have anything to do with the faculty outside of the classroom and they prefer to live in dormitories or apartments with as little adult supervision as possible.