On a Monday in April, a dozen or so students living at the Alice Cook House, Cornell University, New York, had dinner with legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas. They had been invited by Ross Brann, a professor of Judeo-Islamic studies, who also happens to be dean of Cook House, where his apartment has a spacious room meant specifically for this kind of entertaining.

Meanwhile, a university vice-provost was holding an open meeting, on the subject of diversity at Cornell, in the Cook common room, the setting the next night for a panel discussion on Women in Islam. Before it began, in the seminar room next door, residents studying West Asian languages held their weekly Jeopardy competition in Arabic.

On Wednesday, all 350 or so residents — students and graduate fellows — had dinner together. On Thursday, Jewish and Muslim students met for their weekly discussion group, and on Friday, Professor Brann was the host of a tea, where Dr Stephen Ajl, a pediatrics professor with the State University of New York, held forth on the politics of health care. At the same time, Cornell’s director of undergraduate studies in French joined students in a seminar room for their weekly viewing of X-Files reruns. All in all, it was only a moderately busy week at Cook, where the fusion of academic and residential life represents something of a revolution, not just at Cornell but across the country.

Since the mid-’90s, amid concerns about the marginalisation of undergraduates, universities have sought ways to keep upperclassmen from moving off campus while providing more faculty interaction. Dozens have turned to the residential college, a system intended to dissolve the borders between the social and academic elements of campus life by gathering many of them under the same roof — literally.

Cook House, like its counterpart next door, Carl Becker House, is equipped with its own library, computer lab, music practice rooms and dining hall; each is administered by a senior faculty member who lives there, as do half a dozen graduate student mentors. Another 30 faculty and administrative fellows volunteer to lead seminars, study groups and group excursions.

It’s all aimed at making a campus of 13,000 feel more manageable, less like an intimidating institution and more like, well, home.

“It’s the philosophy that a big university need not alienate students from faculty and that a learning atmosphere will be better if students feel a sense of belonging,” says David C. Hardesty Jr, the departing president of West Virginia University, which last August opened a new student residence. Lincoln Hall provides 350 first-year students with their own multimedia theatre, library, resident faculty members and seminars that fulfil general course requirements. “It’s the idea that to improve in the classroom, we have to improve outside the classroom.”

A rash of projects now under way, from Middlebury College in Vermont to Willamette University in Oregon, suggests the trend is expanding. At Cornell, in fact, Cook and Becker are only the first pieces of the $200 million West Campus Initiative; three more houses will be operating by 2010. Louisiana State will open its first residential college in the fall, and Michigan State its third. The $150 million campus-within-a-campus — 10 houses, dean’s residence, dining centre and public square — of Vanderbilt University, Tennessee should be ready in 2008.

The paradigm, of course, is the English college. The 31 colleges that constitute Cambridge and the 39 at Oxford are self-governing units responsible for admitting, housing and feeding students and teaching them — the university is a unifying administrator that determines course offerings and degrees.

Variations were first imported by Yale and Harvard. Both assign students (freshmen at Yale; sophomores at Harvard) to a college they will be affiliated with throughout their stay. Such colleges may or may not offer their own curricula; they may or may not grant degrees.

Yale’s colleges offer classes for credit; Harvard’s don’t. At Rice University, which established its residential college system 50 years ago, entering students eat, sleep and socialise at one of nine colleges but attend classes outside its auspices. The University of Michigan, on the other hand, carved its residential college from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts in 1967, giving it its own faculty, its own interdisciplinary curriculum and its own academic requirements.

This trend is a “generational shift” that amounts to nothing less than “the reform of campus life and undergraduate education”, say administrators. If, in the 1960s, students were reacting to the campus strictures of earlier decades, what happened later was that students got what they wished for. Ever-larger and crowded dorms, essentially unsupervised, came to feel like student warehouses. Fraternity houses with self-selecting populations added to social and racial divisions. Classes, especially introductory lecture courses, dwarfed the individual.

A 1995 book, The Abandoned Generations: Rethinking Higher Education, by William H. Willimon and Thomas H. Naylor, captured the moment succinctly. In it, the authors argued that lax parenting and social permissiveness had changed the kinds of students arriving at colleges. They were inadequately prepared, and when they got there, they found that administrators and faculty had largely turned their backs on teaching in favour of publishing and research. The result, they wrote, was a campus culture whose primary characteristics were “substance abuse, indolence and excessive careerism”.

The current changes are a response to those observations; administrators acknowledge that they hope that keeping students academically engaged for more of their time will keep them out of trouble.

“We went in the ’50s with in loco parentis,” says Gordon Gee, the departing chancellor of Vanderbilt, “and then after the Vietnam War, we went to in loco deny-us, that is, ‘We don’t want anything to do with these kids because they’re crazy’. I call what we’re doing now in loco amicus. We’re going to create an environment in which the students and faculty are friends.”

“The distinction between curricular and extracurricular is a distinction we’re trying to eliminate altogether,” says Frank Wcislo, a Vanderbilt history professor who has been named the first dean of the new Commons, the first stage in a two-decade, campuswide conversion to a residential college system.

The West Campus Initiative at Cornell is emblematic of how residential life shapes a campus. It began under Hunter R. Rawlings III, the university’s president from 1995 to 2003. Rawlings arrived to find what he called “a divided campus”. The dorms then on West Campus were located near many fraternity houses, and tended to attract white suburban students interested in a “pre-fraternity experience”, Rawlings says. Most minority students gravitated to the dorms on North Campus. Seeing an opportunity both to cross-pollinate the campus and to provide incoming students with greater supervision during their first year, Rawlings herded all the freshmen to North Campus. Then he embarked on the West Campus project, which he saw as a way of combating another tradition at Cornell — very hard work offset by very hard partying.

“That struck me as not the healthiest of models,” says Rawlings, who is now a classics professor. “So I thought, if we could set up residential colleges, where students were living not only with their peers, but faculty and graduate fellows, we’d create a different atmosphere, one where residences are not so divorced from the classroom.”

In fact, the idea had already been proposed by a committee on residential life led by Isaac Kramnick, a professor who had long noted students’ disengagement from campus life. With Rawlings as its champion, the West Campus project got its start; it didn’t hurt that the university received a gift of $100 million for the purpose from an anonymous donor.

Since then, the issues that have surfaced have been both practical — the first year, students at Cook House nearly staged a revolt over the limited choices at meals — and philosophical. Entrenched in a system that rewards research, publishing and public speaking more than it does teaching, faculty members have slowly come to back the project, Professor Brann says. The 30 fellow positions for Cook, Becker and Hans Bethe House, a third residence to open next month, have been filled for the fall semester. There is concern that the five deanships, which will rotate every few years, will be difficult to fill because of the 24-hour responsibility.

“The part that’s challenging is getting people to make the commitment to live in,” Professor Brann says. “People are understandably cautious.” Michele M. Moody-Adams, a professor of philosophy who has succeeded Kramnick as vice-provost, explains: “This kind of interaction with students hasn’t been so valued here. It’s a culture change we’re trying to bring about here. But we’re not having a problem with the student side of it.”

Indeed, interviews with a dozen students at Cornell would indicate that in loco amicus is thriving. They don’t think the West Campus houses have changed campus life — not yet — and most students see them not so much as a new learning philosophy as a snazzy new place to live.

“What attracts you initially is that the facilities are so nice,” says Lauren Trakimas, a 21-year-old biology major. But students are amazed to find out how much is going on, she adds, and though some come and go as if Cook were a regular dorm, many “attend every programme”.

Gregory N. Mezey, a sophomore who transferred from the Culinary Institute of America to Cornell’s school of hotel administration, spent the first semester in a traditional dorm. In January, he moved into Becker. “I’ve seen a dramatic difference,” he says. “Cornell is so big, it has so much, and to be in an environment that emphasises experiencing different things with other people has really been beneficial.”