When Jessie Kopmeyer was a freshman, she told her parents she was ready to drop out of Hillsdale. Her older sister gave her a piece of advice: before you go, reach out to one person.
After she recognized a student she barely knew sitting in AJ’s Cafe, Kopmeyer plodded up to say hello. Then, two years later, Kopmeyer is a resident assistant at the college and that student is a mentor and one of her best friends.
Freshman year is a formative time for college students, one that is difficult to navigate without older students to model what life in college should look like. Ideally, this is the function of a freshman’s RAs, but two people cannot carry the responsibility of effectively mentoring an entire hall.
If Hillsdale offered women’s dormitories that included students from all four years, women would have more opportunities for those essential mentorship relationships and the ability to foster and maintain community throughout their time in college.
Dean of Women Diane Philipp said the administration discusses integrating female dorms almost every year, but the consensus is for maintaining the status quo.
“Probably the number one reason is just the programming,” she said. “The programming for freshmen women is more specific in what they do—meet and greets, you know just getting to know their community, their class—than it is for guys. The guys will tell us that freshmen guys and junior guys kind of do the same thing in their activities. But girls don’t.”
Even heavily involved RAs can’t always provide the support freshmen need.
For freshmen men, this is not so great a problem. They have the opportunity to live in one of three mixed-year dormitories: Simpson, Galloway, or Niedfeldt. Freshmen women, with the exceptions of their RAs, live together in either MacIntyre or Olds.
Dean of Men Aaron Petersen said separating the freshmen men in the same way was discussed about a decade ago, and students’ defense of mixed-year dorms was passionate and universal.
“They said, ‘It’s very important. We need that mentoring,’” Petersen said. “They used things like ‘iron sharpens iron.’”
In order to alleviate the stress of adjusting to dorm life, the college provides a variety of resources for freshmen. But an incoming student’s greatest help comes not from the college, but from other students.
“There are few places that provide key opportunities for mentorship like dorm living,” senior Eli West, an RA in Simpson dormitory, said. “Where else do you have the opportunity to live right next to younger guys or girls whom you’re also working with, spending free time with, eating meals with, and doing practically all the exciting and mundane things with in between?”
By January of freshman year, about 35 percent of women will join sororities and pick up bigs who will step into that mentorship role for them. But the majority will not.
According to studies, women are twice as likely to suffer from both depression and anxiety than men. Dr. Lucia Gilbert of Santa Clara University researched the importance of mentors to female students and found that they are effective: more so than men, women rated same-sex mentors as being important to their professional development.
Unfortunately, many women are too afraid to seek out mentors. “An overwhelming 63 percent of women in our study reported that they have never had a formal mentor,” a study produced by Development Dimensions International reported. “According to the hundreds of women who responded, it isn’t because they aren’t willing to mentor; it’s that they are not being asked.”
Most freshmen, like Jessie Kopmeyer, are uncomfortable reaching out for help unless they’re pushed to do so. Freshmen take classes mostly with other freshmen, and when they live only with other freshmen as well, opportunities to develop close relationships with upperclassmen are scarce.
Taylor University, a private liberal arts college in Indiana with around 2,000 students, has eight dormitories, half of which are co-ed, and all of which have students from all four years sharing the same space.
Julia Camara, who graduated from Taylor this year, said the university’s community was the strongest she’s seen.
“Mixed years in the dorm served as a great way to integrate new students into the community and helped detract from discrimination or segregation,” Camara said. “Having upperclassmen down the hall helped with the maturity level of underclassmen and provided a great outlet for mentorship.”
The idea of mixed-class women’s dorms does present a logistical issue at Hillsdale. The largest upperclasswomen dorm is Benzing, which holds only 56 students. By contrast, Niedfeldt, the smallest men’s dorm, holds 50. Perhaps there simply isn’t the space for a mixed-class women’s dorm of Galloway- or Simpson-like proportions.
But due to a recent lack of housing for male students, Chief Administrative Officer Rich Péwé said a new men’s dorm could begin construction in late 2019. If men were moved to current campus dorms, like Koon, the new residence hall could become an experimental mixed-class women’s dorm. Freshmen women could even live on their own halls, so they could share first-year experiences but still live under the same roof with older students.
Mixed-year dorms provide a simple and effective avenue for peer-to-peer mentorship. If the women’s dorms were integrated in the same way as the men’s, perhaps freshmen women would have not only a smoother transition, but also more opportunities for the personal growth that is the central purpose of our time at Hillsdale. For women like Jessie Kopmeyer, sometimes it just takes one older student to change an entire college experience.
Ms. Fry is a junior studying French and journalism.
