Damian Almeida Baray

Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons housed a pilot program that eliminated two resident head positions this year.

Housing & Residence Life (HRL) is “in the early stages of exploring” the possibility of adding a new residence hall on campus, HRL Executive Director David Hibbler confirmed to the Maroon in a statement. A new dorm would help the University reach its goal of accommodating at least 70 percent of undergraduate students in on-campus housing, according to the statement.

Hibbler also told the Maroon that two resident head (RH) positions in Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons (RGGRC) West that had been eliminated as part of a pilot program will be restored next academic year.

The pilot program had replaced two of the four RH positions in RGGRC West with a full-time community director, who supplemented student support offered by the remaining RHs. The community director role will be expanded to other dorms, but not at the expense of resident heads, according to Hibbler.

“While the presence of the Community Director has been widely appreciated, feedback made it clear that the greatest concern was not the role itself, but the perception that it came as a substitute for Resident Heads,” Hibbler said in the statement.

“We love to see the return of RHs,” Undergraduate Student Government (USG) College Council Chair Alex Fuentes said in a statement to the Maroon on behalf of USG. “The RHs give UChicago a very different housing experience compared to other universities, with a wider variety of experiences for students to receive advice on, while still maintaining support from upperclassmen.”

Fuentes added in the statement that USG does not know where a new dorm would be located but expects it to be finished in 2028.

According to U.S. News & World Report, 57 percent of UChicago students lived on campus as of autumn 2023. Increasing that share to 70 percent, Hibbler said, is a “longstanding goal” that would “help build supportive cultural and intellectual communities.”

The University also announced last month that HRL’s governance structure will change, moving the office from Campus and Student Life (CSL) to the College.

“In an effort to more closely align the work of Housing & Residence Life with the overall College experience, HRL is moving from Campus and Student Life into the College, with continued management of most human resources functions, facilities and operations by CSL,” Dean of the College Melina Hale wrote in an April 24 email to College and HRL staff shared with the Maroon. “This will allow us to even better integrate student supports into this part of life at UChicago.”

According to the email, Hibbler and HRL will report to Koryna Bucholz, the current deputy dean of students and chief of staff in the College, who will become associate dean of the College for student experience. The changes will take effect on July 1.

The restructuring comes after a number of HRL staff departures in winter quarter. According to archived versions of the HRL website’s staff page, three of the seven associate and assistant directors of residence life (ADRLs), the communications manager, and the assistant director of operations for Campus North Residential Commons all left HRL between January and March. The ADRL positions for Campus North, Max Palevsky Residential Commons, and Snell-Hitchcock Hall, as well as several communications and operations positions, remain vacant.

The Maroon was unable to reach any of the departed staff members for comment, and Hibbler declined to answer specific questions about the departures.

Two current RHs, who spoke to the Maroon on the condition of anonymity, said the turnover had decreased the support houses have gotten from HRL. “Sometimes it’s hard to get the support and structure that you might need if your [supervisor] is trying to learn their new job, new responsibilities and, like, figure out who you are,” one said.

“The actual support that the RHs are getting, just from their supervisors, just in general, has been lower,” the other RH said. “Some houses haven’t even met with their interim person because they just haven’t had the capacity.”

The second RH added that “reshuffling” of roles had also hurt staff’s ability to support RHs and resident assistants (RAs). “There’s people who should be doing things that are at the higher level, who are now doing more of the boots-on-the-ground supervision, which is not their normal purview,” she said. “They are not doing [that work] at the capacity or to the caliber of someone who’s used to doing that work with you.”

DelGiorno House Council president Isha Mehta, whose house fell under the RGGRC West pilot program this year, said in an interview that she felt “super positive” about HRL’s restoration of RH roles in the dorm.

“The community director role is largely positive, and it has been largely positive in South to have sort of one guiding force of authority that is very accessible by all the students in the dorm,” she said. “The only problem I ever had with the new program was just stripping the RHs that lived in the house and were the closest point of contact [for students]. It’s just so difficult for one person to manage four houses and pay quite as much attention to what’s going on in each house.”