That was another point in the University of Dallas Dean of Students Rules that made me cringe:
4. We need to get the built environment right. No one flourishes in a drab institutional building isolated with a narrow age group. Such a building can never have memory, never have mentorship, never have living traditions. Instead, we need beautiful dorms with multi-age communities—plenty of freshmen, yes, but also well-chosen upperclassmen, graduate students, and even young professors and their families. Younger students can see how a life can be lived two years, five years, even twenty years into the future. (Something of this sort happens on our Rome campus, where professors and their families, twenty-something Rome Coordinators, and students all live together, travel together, eat together, play and pray together.) And of course, this system goes back to the great Oxbridge colleges of the past, in which “dons” lived with layers of different students. In such an environment, students learn hospitality, adult encounter, and yes, adult suffering (and thus misericordia).