Alumni Hall had once been entirely associated with the Sophomore Service Learning Community (SSLC).
For the 2023-24 academic year, members of SSLC were housed in Rudolph Hall on West Campus. In 2024-25, members were placed in the Commons.
For the upcoming 2025-26 school year, SSLC will move back to its roots: Alumni Hall.
This decision has spawned many different opinions.
“I think that Alumni does a lot better in being conducive to community,” senior SSLC facilitator Jack Posin said.
“I do think that it might make the program a little bit smaller, just because I know there were a lot of people that their incentive was to live in the Commons,” current member of SSLC, Lyla Buxton, said.
“I think a lot of the sophomores that I’ve talked to have definitely struggled to see the view of what we’re trying to go for,” junior SSLC facilitator Joey Kirner said.
“I started noticing a trend where we would have a drop in membership if we moved back to Alumni,” junior SSLC co-Chair William Johansen said.
This decision to move SSLC back to Alumni Hall was made in conjunction with current Interim Director of SSLC and Director of the Ethics Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), Dr. Mark Doorley, and Associate Vice Provost for the Integrated Student Experience, Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown.
Their number one motive is community building. In the past year, Doorley has felt a significant lack of comradery in the apartment-style real estate.
“If you talk to [previous] people that lived in Alumni that had the SSLC experience, it was phenomenal,” Doorley said. “They loved the intimacy of it, and the fact that…you could just come out and hang out. Whereas in the apartments, you could still do that, but you have to be way more intentional…So, that’s why we did it.”
Traditionally, sophomores have joined SSLC without living in the program’s designated housing. Conversely, this year, SSLC only began recruiting students who were going to participate in Alumni’s living community. However, now, the recruitment process has opened to all sophomores whether they decide to partake in the offered housing or not.
“I am a firm believer in the community part of [SSLC], and we were always going to open it up for non-community members, but we wanted to foreground that the community was going to be in Alumni,” Doorley said. “I think the motivation for joining the SSLC ought to be to do the service and be in the community, not live in the Commons.”
Doorley founded SSLC in 2000 to integrate both service and community within the Honors Program. It was composed of 32 students.
In 2005, after becoming Director of Service Learning, Noreen Cameron took over the program and drastically expanded it. SSLC is now open to all sophomores, and there are more than 10 services sites for students to choose from. Cameron also implemented the Rudolph and Commons housing from the past two years.
She retired in May of 2024.
Filling-Brown has taken on the new SSLC leadership position. She began working at Villanova after the recent purchase of Cabrini College. With a strong background in service-learning, she is optimistic the move will nurture a more close-knit home base.
“From the main bulk of the years, of the 25 years, it was housed in Alumni,” Filling-Brown said. “The location of it is a great location…it’s centrally-located on campus. And one of the things that I really love about it is that it is across from the newly renovated St. Rita’s Hall which, of course, is the hub of all service and mission activities.”
Because St. Rita’s and Alumni are new neighbors, the incoming SSLC members can frequently utilize St. Ritas’ amenities.
“We’re also hoping to use St. Rita’s as another little common space, like the basement of that, for their kitchen, and just, like, those kinds of community events, as well,” junior SSLC co-Chair Colleen Murray said.
For the 2022-23 academic year, the SSLC community had about 30 students living in Alumni. When the program announced Rudolph as the housing for the 2023–24 year, out of the 46 accepted students, between 30 and 35 chose to live in Rudolph.
This year, the program has expanded to about 120 students. Only about one-third of those students are housed in the Commons.
The enrollment numbers for next year have significantly dropped in comparison to the Rudolph and Commons housing years.
The SSLC facilitators and administrators will continue to weigh the factors and determine other housing options after next year. There is the idea for future living and learning communities to be housed on the grounds of Cabrini College, but no final decisions have been made.
The controversy of this move is sure to continue as the new sophomore service learners move into Alumni Hall this upcoming Fall Semester.