The Department of Residential Education accepts responsibility for creating an environment that promotes the engagement of students in pluralistic living and learning environments that provide a clear focus on the primacy of the academic mission of the University. The department will contribute to the intellectual and personal growth of students, through among other things, supporting in diverse ways the active involvement of students in the daily life of the University and various NYC communities. Our halls will provide opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to share their enthusiasms for learning in an environment that offers a wide range of living options, from small niche communities, to larger, student selected residence halls all of which are focused on utilizing the resources of a large research university in a major metropolitan center.

Guiding Principles:

Focus on Academics

• Develop and nurture a broad range of residentially based learning communities (some of which will also include commuters) that support varied school, faculty, and student life educational goals and strategies.
• Provide effective and exciting new vehicles for teaching and learning that model creative and interdisciplinary educational approaches.

Focus on Intellectual and Personal Growth

• Provide a variety of educational settings and approaches that seek to meet individual resident needs, and that take full advantage of the distinctive opportunities afforded by our different residential environments.
• Recognize and respond to developmental needs of traditional-age students. Within this context we view students holistically as intellectual, social, spiritual, and emotional beings.
• Provide a structured environment in which students are asked to reflect on their own living and learning experiences. This includes accepting responsibility for their behavior and attitudes as well as those of their community members.
• Provide opportunities for students to challenge themselves and expand their worldview through interactions within a diverse community.

Focus on Community

• Provide a warm, welcoming, and nurturing environment that students can consider their home.
• Foster citizenship and community identities, traditions, and connections that reinforce NYU?s culture built on student learning, student/faculty engagement, and embracing diversity. Activities built around collaborative learning projects, community pride, study groups, leadership opportunities, and behavioral standards will strengthen students? connections with each other and feelings of belonging to NYU.
• Use NYC neighborhoods to promote collaborative efforts that are mutually rewarding, challenging, interdependent, and collectively supportive.
• Incorporate broader community resources and service learning opportunities that reach far beyond the possibilities of classroom interactions and relationships in which faculty and staff actively engage students in meaningful reflections on the act of service.
• Use of assessment to provide feedback that will enable a continuous quality improvement of the program. Evidence collected through various assessment efforts will be shared with the university community helping to move toward being a self-reflective institution where decisions are made based on evidence rather than beliefs, opinions, traditions, or the "way it has always been."

Focus on Involvement and Leadership

• Encourage students to develop leadership skills through involvement in residential and campus organizations as well as through the other communities of which they are a part.
• Involve students in planning and managing their residential community activities and academic programs.
• Encourage staff to actively contribute to the profession of student affairs through service with professional associations, publishing, and research projects.

Focus on Diversity

• Foster residential communities that celebrate and respect the distinctiveness of each individual person, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, sex, gender identity, gender expression, ability, or age.
• Promote residential communities that do not tolerate any form of bigotry or harassment, whether verbal, physical, written, direct or implied.
• Provide programs within the residence halls and within New York City that challenge students to learn and to dialogue about the issues that arise in the multicultural and pluralistic world and university in which we live.
• Recruit, select, and train a diverse staff committed to social justice who will conduct their practice by serving each student with dignity, respect, and care.

Distinguishing Features to our Department:

• Diverse geographical locations within the lower Manhattan region.
• Provide a variety of activities, lectures, field trips, film nights, art exhibits, social gatherings, to complement students? academic studies.
• Membership in a community in which the opportunity to engage in collaborative learning, mentoring, and friendship are supported.
• Wide array of physical facilities.
• Professional staff committed to, and trained in the goals of the department.
• Paraprofessional staff including graduate and undergraduate students who are working directly with professional staff members, continuing their own development and facilitating community learning at the residence hall level.
• Traditional residence halls make up 25% of the residential community, and apartment style halls compose 75% of the residential community, giving students a variety of options for their residential experience.
• Department services and procedures focused on quality, student development, and the academic mission.
• Through the key processes of assessment, collaboration and the creation of supportive residential communities, students will find a strong institutional partner in their learning and success.