The SMU Board of Trustees has recently approved the next step in the process of building a slew of new dorms in order to make way for required sophomore housing, said SMU President R. Gerald Turner in an interview with The Daily Campus.

“Over the summer we hired an architectural firm and a builder,” Turner said. “So we brought back the final conceptual package for it, and they approved it. So we will now really go forward in earnest and start construction on it.”

Turner said that he expects building to begin in early 2012 and for the new halls to be open in the fall of 2014. The new dorms will house 1,250 students and will be built at a cost of $134.5 million. The cost will be defrayed by bond proceed and private donations, but the bulk of the money will come from rent revenue paid by students.

“Our residence halls have always been funded by the rent. Other places try and raise private funds that lower the monthly payments, we’ve always used that for academic buildings,” said Turner, who added that because of this, the cost will most likely stay about the same as newly renovated halls such as Boaz and Shuttles.

    The inspiration behind required sophomore housing is academic, Turner said.

“Every private school either around us in the rankings or above us have at least sophomore housing, and many of them have four years,” he said. “We are kind of unusual in that over the years we didn’t build more housing.”

In a recent press release, SMU Provost Paul Ludden agreed with Turner. “No private university in the U.S. News & World Report Top 50 lacks the capacity to house all second-year students on campus, and no private university in that group has less than a 90 percent retention rate of first-year students, or less than an 80 percent six-year graduation rate.”

As of last year, SMU’s first-year retention rate was 88 percent, and its six-year graduation rate was 77 percent. Turner believes that both of these will be increased if sophomore housing goes as planned.

Once the new residential halls are built, all halls on campus will take on a new feel – they will become “residential commons.” All dorms on campus, even already existing dorms, will begin to house one faculty member per building.

The residential commons model “enriches the living and learning environment by emphasizing academic and social balance,” SMU Provost Paul Ludden said. “This intellectual and social community will be appealing to the high-achieving students we seek in greater numbers. The presence of faculty in Residential Commons will create greater opportunities for sharing ideas, informal interactions and mentoring.”

A few SMU residential halls already follow this model, including the Hilltop Scholars dorm as well as Virginia-Snider.Turner said that SMU has been consulting other schools with similar programs in order to assess optimal strategies for implementing the programs.

“”There are a lot of schools that have residential commons so rather than trying to reinvent the wheel we will try and talk to them and figure out what works,” Turner said.

Thus far, Provost Ludden and Vice President for Student Affairs Lori S. White have visited schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, Rice and Vanderbilt in order to assess the success of their programs, said Turner.

And while the new dorms will create a drastic change in SMU’s lifestyle, Turner says that it will have little affect on Greek life.

Fraternity members will still be able to move into Greek houses during their sophomore year, as this will count as fulfilling the requirements for living on campus.

“We are going to work up some guidelines about how that could occur because we think it would be better if only juniors and seniors were in frat houses like it is with sororities,” said Turner. “Our sense is if we can make the residential commons what it ought to be, many will choose to stay there instead of going to the frat houses.”

Turner says that the Board of Trustees will be seeking constant student feedback during this process. He said that in the most recent emailed survey, three fourths of the students who responded said that they would prefer mandatory student housing.

Turner said: “Its sort of like food service. We get feedback all the time about what food student want and how they want it structured. And I think that’s why people are happy with the food service here. So we want the same kind of impact for the housing.”