The Ad Hoc Committee on the Purposes of a Residential College was established in 1967 by members of the Board of Trustees Committee on Religion and Student Life to assess the social dimension of the Mount Holyoke College experience. The committee's charge was to examine the role of a residential versus a commuter institution, a women's versus a coeducational college, and a private versus a public setting. The committee also provided a sounding board for the problems and desires of students. Members of the committee were two representatives from the Student Government Association; the parents of a student trustees "Peggy" (Irene) Gillette Steiner and Louis F. Oldershaw; faculty members Edward Chittenden and Isabelle B. Sprague; College administrators Ruth Warfel and Mary Tuttle; and Elizabeth Rogers, an alumna.

Records of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Purposes of a Residential College contain meeting minutes, agenda correspondence, memoranda, pamphlets, questionnaires, newspaper articles, reports, lists of committee members, purpose statements, transcripts of speeches by members of the Student Government Association, student proposals for college rules, and statements on the rights and freedoms of students. The records address a range of issues such as student participation in institutional planning and decision-making, relaxing the policy requiring unmarried students to live on campus, consumption of alcoholic beverages by students on campus, self-scheduled exams, parietals, dress codes, and the honor code.

Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:

Mount Holyoke College. Board of Trustees. Ad Hoc Committee on the Purposes of a Residential College, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.

Processed by Patricia J. Albright, 2007. Peter Carini and Juliana Kuipers assisted with the arrangement and description of these records from 1999-2002.