Ten years ago, Dartmouth launched a new house community system to foster intellectual engagement between students and faculty outside of the classroom and to provide more continuity and sense of community in the residential experience.
Through the Office of Residential Education, the six house communities clustered existing residence halls for students, designated houses for event use by faculty who serve as house professors, and created a team that helms wide-ranging programs of social and academic events, weekly newsletters, and other extracurricular activities reaching students in each community—even when they are off-campus during their D-Plan.
Spread across campus, Allen House, East Wheelock House, North Park House, School House, South House, and West House have, over time, become closely knit into the fabric of campus life.
The early years
All incoming students are assigned to one of the houses and maintain their affiliation throughout their time at Dartmouth. The inaugural professor of School House was Craig Sutton, a professor of mathematics and director of the E.E. Just Program.
“As a residential liberal arts college, we believe in the educational power of bringing students, faculty, and staff into close, sustained orbit with one another. So it’s really incumbent upon us to create structures to reinforce that ideal. The house system has helped us achieve that,” says Sutton.
Sutton says the houses designated for house professors are comfortable, homey venues for all kinds of activities, including small-scale get-togethers with visiting writers and artists.
“Many would come in through the Hopkins Center,” he recalls. “One highlight was inviting Michelle Dorrance, a MacArthur genius award-winning choreographer, into our living room.”
House professors also host an open house for first-year students after Matriculation.
Each house community is led by a “trio team” of the house professor, an assistant director, and a program administrator in the Office of Residential Education. Four graduate resident fellows and a team of undergraduate advisers round out the support network.
“Every member of the residential education team brings their skills to address students’ needs and create special programs that resonate for the community,” says Stacey Millard, associate dean for residential life.
Noah Manning ’17 participated in early planning meetings before becoming a leader in West House, where he says he felt welcomed into the family of House Professor Ryan Hickox, a professor of physics and astronomy.
“What made it exciting when I was there is that the new system was a blank slate. There was no history, no stereotype,” says Manning. “Dartmouth at its best has an incredibly deep sense of community. It’s isolated in the best way. It’s not in the center of a major city. And that deep inward connection allowed us to form community in our own way.”
As they made their marks on campus life, Manning says each house forged its own identity, choosing distinctive symbols and mascots and participating in robust intramural sports.
“In West House, we chose the emblem of a tree because of the huge tree next to the affiliated dorms, Fahey, McLane, and Russell Sage, to say, ‘This is our space, and this is what it means.’”
The house communities also support the Dartmouth community in troubling times, such as following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. In response, School House launched a coalition of students, faculty, and staff that hosted lectures and conversations exploring anti-Black racism, social justice, and other related issues.
“House communities can really bring together a cross-section of the Dartmouth community,” Sutton says. “At their best, the house communities flatten out hierarchies and help us span generations.”
Coming of age
Hanna Bilgin ’28, president of the School House Council, says she loves organizing end-of-term “de-stressors, just offering fresh fruit or waffles or some sort of meal to bring everyone together during midterms and finals. Some of our events get over 400 people coming in and out, stopping by for a snack, staying for as long as they’d like.”
Bilgin, who is from Chicago, remembers the first day she arrived on campus, “walking through my dorm, introducing myself to everyone there…and now my best friends are all people I met through School House. We spend so much time together.”
Newcomers to the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies are also finding a sense of belonging in the house communities. Emmanuel Durodola, a PhD student in physics and astronomy, joined East Wheelock House after graduating from California State University, Northridge. He says graduate students often find it hard to knit themselves into campus life because they work in many different departments and schools, and may also live off campus. As a resident fellow, Durodola receives free room and board in return for helping plan activities and trips that help create for members a strong sense of solidarity and place.
“One of my favorites was a trip to Silloway Maple in Randolph, Vermont, led by our wonderful program administrator, Bonghee Lis,” he says. “We got to see how maple syrup was made, and that was an off-campus experience many students wouldn’t otherwise get to have.”
Kicking off the house communities’ 10th anniversary on Feb. 26 was a special Founders Day reception at the newly renovated Top of the Hop, reminiscent of the 2016 launch event, when undergraduate “founding members” first received news of their house affiliations. A lively dance party followed. The celebrations will continue on May 22 with the culmination of the 2025-2026 House Cup competition. Other festivities are being planned by the individual houses to observe the milestone.
Vladin Thadhani ’26, who is majoring in mathematics and computer science with a minor in linguistics, missed the celebration because he spent winter term on a Foreign Study Program. An undergraduate adviser, he looks forward to reuniting with his School House friends.
“I’m Indian, from London, and I’ve also lived in Dubai,” he says. “That’s a complex set of identities, so I feel that I stand in a very specific spot where I can understand all of those cultures.” Thadhani says he tries to create a feeling of home for other School House students, wherever they come from.
A living lab for friendship
As she completes her ninth and final year as Allen House Professor, Janice McCabe, an associate professor of sociology, says she has found in house communities “a wonderful opportunity to put into practice the things that I was studying in my research about friendship, and to really see it in action.”
McCabe, the author of a new book on friendship networks in college, says most friendships are either identity- or interest-based, which sociologists refer to as “homophily,” or based on proximity, known as “propinquity.” Dartmouth, like many colleges, affords many opportunities for homophily to bring people together on campus, she says.
“It’s also important to create spaces, like the house communities, where there’s a wonderful random assortment of people drawing on that second driver of friendships, propinquity. It’s a structural feature that we often don’t see in everyday life, but it’s why we’re more likely to be friends with the person who has the office next to us, or lives next door to us.”
Or, she adds, belongs to the same house community.
Allen House and School House share a house center known colloquially as The Cube, a light-filled, free-standing gathering space. “So people are seeing each other regularly there—not only undergraduates, but also faculty, staff, and graduate students,” McCabe says. “It’s a way to make Dartmouth feel smaller and to have stronger connections.”
McCabe says it took some time for house communities to take root, but the more activities they sponsored, the more students and, increasingly, other faculty and staff members, flocked to them.
“I think we have all grown and improved in a range of ways,” says McCabe. “At Allen House we now have regular, signature activities, like a community dinner every term and a weekly yoga class that we do with the Student Wellness Center. We also have a speaker series that we call Red Talks—tales of life and work, because our color’s red.”
McCabe says a new faculty fellows program is bringing in colleagues from across campus to plan or appear in House events. To celebrate Lunar New Year, for example, Faculty Fellow Miya Qiong Xie, an associate professor of Chinese and comparative East Asian literature, organized a dumpling-making party.
“There’s something really special about doing things with your hands while you’re with people,” says McCabe. “It allows so many different kinds of conversations to happen.”
Looking ahead, the ongoing renewal of residence halls throughout campus has also helped integrate programming, and the reopening of Fayerweather Hall, part of South House, this summer, and Russo Hall in the fall is also helping to provide gathering spaces within residential spaces. The additions of house centers have also created valuable multi-use space for programs.
“The Faculty Fellows Program is really growing, and I love how the house communities are getting more integrated into the arts and sciences. We have strong partnerships now with many places on campus—the Hood, the Hop, the Montgomery Fellows Program, the Climate Collaborative—so it’s been great to see the communities become more and more integrated, not only into students’ experiences, but in the campus structure,” says McCabe.
“I see that continuing and deepening.”
