Canyon homes altering campus culture?

When the first five canyon homes opened as student housing in the fall of 2022, not many students knew what they were or how they operated. History major Ashlee Wilson came to TMU a year before the canyon homes existed.

“I would just see [students] walking past the caf and back to their homes,” Wilson said, remembering the first semester they were used for housing. “I was in the dorms, so I was pretty removed from that part of campus life.”

The university has obtained 30 homes in the canyon, with 17 in use hosting up to 12 students per home for both male and female households. With the number of homes growing and their presence on campus becoming more established, students are noticing an impact on student life and the culture on campus.

After three years in the dorms, Wilson, now a senior, chose to spend her last semester at the university in a canyon home.

“There are a lot of benefits, like being able to have your own kitchen and being able to cook your own food,” Wilson said. “I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily happier, but I do really like it and it is really nice.”

Wilson mentioned the seclusion as both a benefit and a cost of being in a canyon home. Students have more independence and privacy while still being near campus. On the other hand, she said, “It’s harder to meet people… and I’ve had people that I know be like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen you around campus this semester.’”

Senior Kirsty Carmichael, the resident assistant of the Calvin canyon home, began her time at TMU in January, 2022.

“Before the canyon homes existing, you were rubbing shoulders with freshmen and seniors while brushing teeth in the bathroom,” she said.

Now, many upperclassmen, like Wilson and Carmichael, are leaving the dorms to finish out their last years of college in these homes. In the Calvin home, nearly all the girls are seniors, taking upper division classes, living independent lives and figuring out their futures.

“We’re all in that stage of ‘Where are we going next?’ A lot of our conversations around the dinner table are oriented around that. It’s a different type of camaraderie,” Carmichael observed.

As the upperclassmen move away from the dorms, she believes the canyon homes have begun to develop their own “subculture” on campus.

Carmichael described the unity of the dorms.

“Hotchkiss knows Dixon is having a Coffee House, and CDub knows that Hotchkiss is going to prank Waldock, and everyone is in each other’s business over there—as opposed to the canyon homes, we’re embedded in the canyon, so we’re disengaged from the dorm life,” she said.

Carmichael remembers being  a sophomore when her junior and senior friends left to live in the canyon homes. She rarely saw them without having to set a date to get coffee and catch up for an hour during the semester—sweet, but no substitute to the intimacy of dorm culture.

“Our interaction was in the dorm, sitting on someone’s bed, brushing our teeth together. You don’t have that when you’re in a dorm and they’re in a canyon home,” Carmichael said.

This distance between canyon homes and dorms comes with pros and cons, Riley Whittington, RA of the Edwards canyon home, observed.

“On the one hand, you can have more quiet, you can get with a group of people and move to a home, and you can really define the culture in that particular home,” Whittington said. “The difficulty normally is upperclassmen who aren’t really interested in expanding their friend groups, not really interested in interacting with people who they didn’t know prior to moving to the home.”

As a result, older and more experienced students don’t have the opportunity to interact as much with younger or incoming students, something that was a key part of dorm life.

“In the dorms, you have such a range of academic years where you can be really close friends with someone who’s older than you,” Whittington said.

During his freshman year in Waldock, Whittington got to see his RA go from single to dating to engaged, and finally at the end of the year to getting married. Another close senior friend got engaged in Whittington’s first semester. 

“To be able to see people who are your peers walk through those big life events is really big,” he said.

O.J. Gibson, the resident director of Waldock and head RD of TMU men, explained the tension between canyon homes and dorm life. 

“We want students in the canyon homes that are ready for it, that can handle it really well in that setting,” he said. 

At the same time, the leadership in student life sees the importance of keeping upperclassmen and student leaders in the dorms.

“We’re trying to get a ratio of about 50% new students up in the dorms,” Gibson said. “And then for upperclassmen and returners, we’re trying to fill canyon homes and the other 50% of the dorms with returners and try to make sure it’s a nice mix so that everyone can get to know each other and we can build community there.”

Gibson and the rest of the housing committee, including the other RDs, are thinking carefully about how to deal with the potential pitfalls of having upperclassmen in the canyon homes.

“We had the canyon homes before we had a strategy for the canyon homes,” Gibson said, recalling the “trial and erroring” that took place the first couple of years.

He now thinks student life leadership is more prepared to help mitigate the problems and facilitate a thriving community among all of the student body.

“We don’t want the canyon homes to affect the dorms,” Gibson said. “We want the dorms to positively affect the canyon homes, and for the canyon homes to really catch what relational ministry and relational living and being part of a community is all about.”