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Dormitory

[dawr-mi-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee]

Dormitory typically refers in the United States to residence halls, which are sleeping quarters or entire buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for large numbers of people, often boarding school, college or university students. The U.K. equivalent for universities is Hall of residence, although "dormitory" is still used for schools.

Higher education

Most colleges and universities provide single or multiple occupancy rooms for their students, usually at a cost. These buildings consist of many such rooms, like an apartment building, and the number of rooms varies quite widely from just a few to hundreds. The largest dormitory building is Bancroft Hall at the United States Naval Academy.

Many colleges and universities no longer recognize the word "dormitory" and staff are now using the term residence hall (analogous to the United Kingdom "hall of residence") or simply "hall" instead. This is promoted as better describing a living and learning community that is part of the larger academic institution. When the word "dorm" was first adapted for universities and colleges, the atmosphere of the buildings served as places for students to sleep. Often students had a curfew to be in the building for "lights out" and a "dorm mother" was in charge of running the building. This is no longer true as residence halls as of 2007 strive to provide a more inclusive community for residents. Features of life such as cafeterias, academic centers, active and passive programming, resident assistants and hall coordinators have given a new experience to living on campus.

College and university residential rooms vary in size, shape, facilities and number of occupants. Typically, a United States residence hall room holds two students with no toilet. This is usually referred to as a "double". Often, residence halls have communal bathroom facilities. In the United States, residence halls are sometimes segregated by sex, with men living in one group of rooms, and women in another. Some dormitory complexes are single-sex with varying limits on visits by persons of each sex. For example, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has a long history of Parietals, or mixed visiting hours. Most colleges and universities offer coeducational dorms, where either men and women reside on separate floors but in the same building or where both sexes share a floor but with individual rooms being single-sex. In the early 2000s, dorms that allowed people of opposite sexes to share a room became available in some public universities. Some colleges and university coeducational dormitories also feature coeducational bathrooms. Most residence halls are much closer to campus than comparable private housing such as apartment buildings. This convenience is a major factor in the choice of where to live since living physically closer to classrooms is often preferred, particularly for first-year students who may not be permitted to park vehicles on campus. Universities may therefore provide priority to first-year students when allocating this accomodation.

Halls located away from university facilities sometimes have extra amenities such as a recreation room or bar. As with campus located residence halls, these off-campus halls commonly also have Internet facilities, either through a network connection in each student room, a central computer cluster room, or Wi-Fi. Catered halls may charge for food by the meal or through a termly subscription. They may also contain basic kitchen facilities for student use outside catering hours. Most halls contain a laundry room.

In U.K. universities these buildings are usually called "halls of residence" (commonly referred to as "halls"), except at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews, York, Lancaster and Kent where the residential accommodation is incorporated in each college's complex of buildings, and there is no specific term for it (members of the college who live in its own buildings are usually said to be "living in", or "living in college"), although "halls of residence" is still used at times.

Terminology

The terms "residence hall" and "dorm" are often used interchangeably. However, within the residence life community, the term "residence hall" is preferred. According to the University of Oregon, their facilities "provide not just a place to sleep, but also opportunities for personal and educational growth. Highly trained Residence Life staff and Hall Government officers support this objective by creating engaging activities and programs in each hall or complex.

Examples

Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan has the largest residence hall system in the United States. 16,000 students live within 23 different undergraduate buildings, one graduate hall, and three apartment villages. Freshmen are required to live on the 45,000+ student campus for at least their first year.

The Watterson Towers at Illinois State University are among the tallest residence halls in the world. The 28-story complex, which was built in 1967 holds over 2,200 students and its buildings are 91 meters tall.

The Sandburg Halls at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee consists of four high rise towers with a total housing capacity of 2,700 students.

Dobie Center, an off-campus, 27-story private dormitory next to The University of Texas at Austin, stands at 112 meters. In addition to being a private residence for students, Dobie also contains a 2 story mall, a movie theatre, restaurants, and specialty stores. The Valkendorfs Kollegium at the University of Copenhagen was founded in 1589. Though not as old as some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, it is among the oldest dormitories in the world.

The Stone Frigate at Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario was constructed in 1820 to store part of the dismantled fleet from the War of 1812. The former warehouse was converted into a dormitory and classrooms when the college was established in 1874. The Stone Frigate, a designated heritage building, was closed for more than 18 months for major renovations to the interior and exterior of the dormitory.

The Capstone House at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina completed in 1967, standing at 18 stories, has the only revolving restaurant on an American college campus located on the 18th floor know as Top of Carolina Dining Room..

East Halls at Penn State located in State College, Pennsylvania has the largest dormitory complex in the world.

Hall governments

At some schools, each residence hall has its own hall council. Where they exist, such individual councils are usually part of a larger organization called, variously, Residence Hall Association, Resident Students Association, or Junior Common Room Committee which typically provides funds and oversees the individual building council. Hall councils plan social events and voice concerns for their residents to the university or college staff responsible for overall management of halls.

Staffing

United States

University residence halls are normally staffed by a combination of both students and professional residence life staff. Student staff members or Resident Assistants, act as liaisons, counselors, mediators and policy enforcers. The student staff is supervised by a graduate student or a full-time residence life professional. Staff members frequently arrange programming activities to help residents learn about social and academic life during their college life.

United Kingdom

U.K. halls often run a similar setup to that in the U.S., although the resident academic responsible for the hall is known by the terms of "warden" and may be supported by a team of vice-wardens, sub-wardens or senior-members; forming the SCR (Senior Common Room). These are often students or academic staff at the relevant university/college. Many UK halls also have a JCR (Junior Common Room) committee, usually made up of second year students who stayed in that hall during their first year. The facilities in the hall are often managed by an individual termed the Bursar.

Residence Halls typically have housekeeping staff to maintain the cleanliness of common rooms including lobbies and bathrooms. Students are normally required to maintain the cleanliness of their own rooms and private or semi-private bathrooms, where offered.

United States military

Dormitories have replaced barracks at most U.S. military installations. Much new construction includes private bathrooms, but most unaccompanied housing as of 2007 still features bathrooms between pairs of rooms. Traditional communal shower facilities, typically one per floor, are now considered substandard and are being phased out.

U.S. military dormitory accommodations are generally intended for two junior enlisted single personnel per room, although in most cases this is slowly being phased out in favor of single occupancy in accordance with newer Department of Defense standards.

All branches of the U.S. military except the Air Force still refer to these dormitory-style accommodations as "barracks". The Air Force, in contrast, refers to all unaccompanied housing, including basic training open-bay barracks housing dozens per room as well as unaccompanied housing for senior ranking personnel, which resemble apartments and are only found in a select number of overseas locations, as "dormitories".

Sleeping dormitories

In the U.S., U.K. and Canada, a dormitory has a different meaning, and is used for a room with more than one bed. Examples are found in British boarding schools and many rooming houses such as hostels but have nowadays completely vanished as a type of accommodation in university halls of residence. CADs, or Cold-Air Dormitories, are found in multi-level rooming houses such as fraternities, sororities, and cooperative houses. In CADs and in hostels, the room typically has very few furnishings except for beds. Such rooms can contain anywhere from three to 50 beds (though such very large dormitories are rare except perhaps as military barracks). Such rooms provide little or no privacy for the residents, and very limited storage for personal items in or near the beds.

Company dormitories

Formerly, many companies in the U.S. and elsewhere housed employees in dormitories. This practice has dwindled, but continues in other countries. In the Netherlands the law forbids companies to offer housing to their employees, because the government wants to prevent people who have just lost their job adding to their stressful situation by having to search for new housing.

In Japan, many of the larger companies still offer to their newly graduated freshmen a room in a dormitory. A room in such a dormitory often comes with a communal cook (for the men) or rooms with furnished kitchen blocks (for the women). Usually the employees pay a very small amount of money to enable the men (especially) to save money to buy a house when they get married.

Correctional facilities

Housing units in correctional facilities that house more than the one or two prisoners normally held in cells are referred to as "dormitories" as well. Housing arrangements can vary widely. In some cases, correctional dormitories in low-security institutions may almost resemble their academic counterparts, with the obvious differences of being locked at night, being administered by corrections officers, and subject to stricter institutional rules and fewer amenities. In other institutions, dormitories may be large rooms, often converted from other purposes such as gymnasiums in response to overcrowding, in which hundreds of prisoners have bunks and lockers.