They appear to be typical college students, not wizards-in-training, but their new home is anything but standard-issue: a hilltop castle, where they can stay until they graduate from UC Berkeley. "I've always wanted to live in a house that had a library," said Micah Ackerman Hirsch, a junior American Studies major from Palo Alto who took a break last week in a different room -- a lounge with a baby grand, gas fireplace and tall windows overlooking the bay. What makes the newly reopened Bowles Hall stand apart, besides its turrets and $42 million, alumni-financed restoration, is its larger purpose: to make a big school feel small. About 180 undergraduates who underwent a rigorous selection process will live, eat, socialize and study here -- with a corps of live-in graduate students and other academics on hand to guide their college experience.
With classes beginning Wednesday, the reopening of 87-year-old Bowles, the nation's first residential college, is part of a larger revival. The tight-knit houses, which came into fashion at Harvard and other elite colleges in the 1930s, have undergone a resurgence in the past decade, experts say. Ivy League colleges and large research institutions alike, from Princeton to the University of Kentucky, are embracing the throwback living arrangement to give students greater social stability and built-in academic counsel. Some 30 U.S. colleges now have them, as do the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore.
"This is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It's an international phenomenon," said Robert O'Hara, an education writer from Massachusetts and author of The Collegiate Way website, which tracks the trend.
Indeed, UC Berkeley's outgoing chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, said last year that he saw Bowles "as a pilot project -- a vital step towards the day when we can and will offer all of our freshmen and sophomores housing in residential colleges," according to a transcript of his remarks at a summer groundbreaking ceremony.
On Thursday, as two students sang pop songs at the piano in the high-ceilinged lounge, Ackerman Hirsch, Henderson Wong and Lauren Stoops -- whose father lived in Bowles Hall -- talked about why they signed up. They were among the 30-some students who lived together last year in a pilot program to test the model, which for the first time includes both men and women.
"I was drawn to having a place that was your community, where you can feel at home, even in a place as large as Berkeley," said Ackerman Hirsch. Living in the dorms freshman year, he said, "was very isolating."
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