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		The Use of Chaos Theory in Residence Hall Management Submitted By: Greg Spahr, Assistant Director of Student Affairs at the Hazleton Campus of the Pennsylvania State University Let’s be honest. Student centered student development theory does not work, particularly in a Residence Hall setting. Despite the best efforts of practitioners over the past twenty plus years alcohol use remains relatively consistent and binge drinking, especially among women, is up. Drug use has gone up and down and at the moment appears to be in an up phase. Depression is increasing in the college population. Incivility and violence have increased. Retention has not improved. Therefore why do we keep doing the same things? This period in student affairs history will be remembered as the time when practitioners applied leaches, waved rattles, and chanted the mantra. “Why can’t we all just get along?” Student development theory is the problem. Actually the problem is the lack of a student’s development theory. Current theories are counseling based. They are founded on individual or small group behavior, targeted to individuals who are having problems, do not take into account the effects the targeted student is having on other students in the environment, and are more explanatory than predictive. Our profession has no systemically based theories with which to support our decisions. The closest is probably Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and this is actually societal, not based on college environments. This situation may work for counselors, admissions reps, judicial affairs people, academic advisors, and others who do work with one student at a time. It is inadequate for residence life people, greek advisors, union managers, student government advisors, and chief student affairs officers who may be in charge of hundreds of people simultaneously. Most of us follow the 95 and 5 rule, i.e., we spend 95 % of our time with 5% of our students. Or to mangle an old adage: We don’t have time to manage the forest because we are too busy saving the trees. Fortunately, there exists in the other sciences a branch known as systems theory. Systems theory states that there are similarities in how systems act and react. These similarities occur; 1. No matter the scale of the system, 2. No matter how complex the system, and 3. No matter what the individual items in the system are. I have been part of Residence Life systems as small as 135 students up to thousands of students, possessing myself as the sole professional practitioner in one building to dozens of buildings with multiple layers of professionals. They all had roommate issues, alcohol and drug problems, noise complaints, RA selection and training, opening and closing, etc. If you removed all the students and replaced them with sheep, some sheep would get along and some would fight. Some sheep would never leave their rooms and some rooms would become overcrowded. If you replaced the sheep with plants, some would thrive and some would die. Left on their own, these things would happen in approximately the same proportions as they occur with students in residence halls. Systems theories break into two divisions. One division relates more to organizational structures of management, economics, and leadership. The other builds along more mathematical and scientific structures of physical systems, ecological systems, and chaos. Systemic managers will act in ways that counselors find unacceptable and vice versa. A systemic manager will regret giving second, third, and subsequent chances to a student who has pulled a 0.00 GPA, has shown evidence of drug problems, and is causing distress to the other students in the environment. Student centered practitioners would be aghast if colleges were run under systemic management. A recent example of systemic management is how the Mad Cow Disease outbreak was handled. Not only did the people involved not try to save the animal that proved to be infected, they ended up destroying hundreds of animals in multiple herds, even though there was no evidence any of these animals was infected. The people in charge considered the possible consequences to be so severe that such a drastic action was necessary to insure the safety of the entire United States cattle population. Before you say that residence life people would never do anything that would take advantage of the innocent in such a fashion, let me ask how you do common area damage billing. This is the only procedure of which I know where many departments actually apply systemic management principles. To me, the most useful of the systemic theories is chaos theory. The only instance where most people are actually aware of chaos theory is probably Jeff Goldblum dropping water onto the back of his hand in “Jurassic Park.” Actually chaos theory is the study of systems where there are recurring patterns, but that these patterns are so complex that the pattern is not obvious and accurately predicting any single instance is impossible. Chaos Theory took hold in the 1960’s when various scientific branches stopped trying to eliminate reality to develop idealized equations and explanations and began trying to explain why reality didn’t fit the idealized models. (Sound familiar?) A meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was attempting to develop a computer program that would improve long range weather forecasting. One day rather than recalculating the precise variables about half way through a thirty day forecast he read the graph which his program produced and created a second graph. He was astonished when he found that the further into the second graph he went the less it looked liked the first one. He discovered that the variable he had read as .56 was actually .560127. That is about like adding one ounce to a 275 lb. person. The fact that such a tiny difference produced great changes over time became one of the founding tenets of Chaos Theory. This idea has become known as the butterfly effect. “The butterfly that flaps its wings in China creates the hurricane which hits Florida.” I have confidence that most practitioners would handle a suicide, or a sexual assault, or a riot correctly. However, what will cause massive differences in your residence halls will be that small interaction concerning noise, the quick thank you (or not) to a student, or giving someone the correct procedures for Drop/Add. It’s the little things that count. Two other chaotic precepts are fairly complementary. The first is the Joseph effect. That is, a system which is in an extreme state will tend to stay in that extreme state. The Sahara desert will probably not just go away. Neither will “the floor from hell.” On the other hand, if you create a program that is working quite well it will not tend to fall apart on its own. The other precept is more counterintuitive. The Noah effect states that when chaotic systems change, the changes tend to be rapid and dramatic, not gradual. A real world example of these two working in tandem would be the last few years of Pennsylvania weather. We were in a severe drought for a lengthy period of time. The drought ended not by us gradually catching up on rainfall over a number of months. The area I am in caught the remnants of tropical storms and hurricanes and then went directly into one of the snowiest winters ever. Last spring produced instances of flooding. Then we received the leftovers of Hurricane Isabel. Finally, this winter was being fairly severe, but then, out of nowhere, we encountered the second longest spell of no precipitation in February on record. The trick, of course, is being knowledgeable enough about your system to differentiate a Joseph from a Noah. Two examples from my experience can hopefully illustrate this. I was in my eighth year at a previous position. The general environment was steadily improving and I had not had to terminate a contract for over five years. All of the sudden I had eight terminations; two for fighting (not in my building), and six for drugs. All six were reported by other residents, none were discovered by RAs. I could have panicked and changed a number of the things we were doing. However, I assumed that this was a temporary aberration. The next year, there were no contract terminations. In fact we had only one alcohol violation. That fall, over 25% of the students in my building made the Dean’s list and one in eight made 4.0s. In my present position I made some changes when I arrived and the situation was getting better. Discipline was down and we had a 50% increase in the number of students on the Dean’s list after my third year. Our main campus decided to remodel our largest hall, which did need it. However, they decided to undo one of the changes I had made over our objections. One and a half years later The Dean’s list numbers were down by 25% and the number of students in academic trouble actually outnumbered those on the Dean’s list. The campus went to bat and we were allowed to go back to the previous configuration. Now, two years later, the number of Dean’s list students is the highest it has been, and the academic trouble numbers are down about 30%. In fact we have a better than two to one ratio of Dean’s list students to students in academic trouble. The change that needed to be made was a good example of the butterfly effect. That building houses our freshmen and has two large lounge areas, one on the first floor and one in the basement. When I arrived the first floor lounge was for studying and the basement lounge was for community. After viewing the system I changed the two. That was the change that was reversed and then reinstated. Although it sounds like it should not have much influence it made all the difference in the world. There are other chaotic concepts that have direct applications to residence halls. The first is entropy, the idea that all systems, left alone, tend to move from a state of more order to a state of more disorder over time. A good example of this is the state of student rooms on move-in day contrasted with a time period later in the year. Chaotic systems are complex in that there are many variables which influence the system. For residence departments that means the number of buildings, physical layouts of buildings, location of buildings on campus, student demographics, layers of staff, location of campus, etc. A change in any of these variables will create a much different campus. Chaotic systems are often fractal. A fractal system is one in which you cannot tell the magnitude of the system without points of reference. Mountain ranges and coastlines are fractal. A Residence department might be fractal as well. If you attempt to create the same student demographics in all your buildings as occur in your system you have created fractility. Generally, Residence life professionals tend to destroy fractility by creating specialized areas for freshmen or Greeks, substance free housing, single sex housing, and so forth. The upshot of creating pockets of order is that you then concentrate the chaos in the rest of the system. Turbulence is chaos working in a fractal manner. That is, the entire system is in chaos because of chaotic events that may be composed of even smaller chaotic events. The real world equivalent is the smoothly flowing river that goes into white water because of a number of rocks and eddies packed into a small area that would be much less of a problem if encountered individually. The bad news is that the minimum number of chaotic events that it takes to throw an orderly system into turbulence is three. If things are going well but you then, in rapid succession or simultaneously; have a suicide attempt in one building, a drug overdose in another, and a roommate dispute that grows into a floor war you have encountered turbulence. What forms a chaotic system is the interrelationships between a number of variables. This is why long range weather forecasting is so difficult. The small change in wind direction has an effect on the temperature, which has an impact on the probability of precipitation being rain or snow. In chaos science, these relationships may be difficult to pinpoint. One of the earliest examples of this was a study of flowers on an isolated mesa. The researcher studied numerous ecological factors in an effort to determine what caused the flower population to increase or decrease. He eliminated rainfall, temperature, pollination by bees, and everything else which he could conceive might have an impact. Finally he discovered the only variable that seemed to coincide with the flower population. It was the ant population. The more ants there were, the more flowers; the fewer ants, the fewer flowers. Another descriptor for chaotic systems is self-iterating. This means that today’s situation is the sum of yesterday’s conditions, which in turn produces tomorrow’s conditions. Another, not necessarily chaotic, descriptor is whether the system is closed or open. A closed system has no items enter or leave. A floor where all the residents are the same for a semester could be said to be closed. Open systems have items leave or enter. Your overall department is probably an open system. What do we do with all these concepts? The problem with chaos is its unpredictability. Therefore all of our efforts should go into eliminating chaotic variables and therefore increasing predictability and stability in our system. One can use chaos theory to support either one of two theories of discipline. The first is that because every student is a complex and chaotic individual, and that because each situation they encounter is similarly complex, every disciplinary response will be different to target the complexities of the overall interaction. The second is that every educational institution is an inherently chaotic system. Therefore, administrators must use similar sanctions in similar cases to lessen the chaos. Students faced with uncertain consequences will make wildly differing choices while students who know what the probable response to their action will be more likely to make similar choices when faced with temptations. I believe the second choice is more valid. The items I track to manage the system include overall discipline, drug and alcohol incidents, damage, and contract terminations. The use of alcohol and drugs by students makes them more unpredictable at the individual interaction level. Because this use has an impact on retention it makes the entire population more unstable and unpredictable. With contract terminations the fewer the better, but not if it is because students are getting multiple chances. Setting strict lines allows students to moderate their own behavior. The population becomes more stable, thus more predictable. Another item I track closely is academics. I follow the number of students who make the Dean’s list, the number of 4.0s, and the number of students under 2.0 (that puts them in academic peril in our system) each semester. The greater the number of students doing well and the fewer doing poorly helps with retention, which in turn creates stability. Additionally those doing well tend to have fewer discipline issues. Knowing those who are having academic issues allows us to try to intervene, assist them, and retain them. We follow demographics where possible. Are ethnic groups self-segregating? What are the ratios of stabilizing upperclassmen to more unpredictable freshmen in buildings? What is the male/female ratio? All of these items have an impact on the unpredictability of a floor or building. When possible we break down all of this information to the building and floor level and get it in the hands of RAs. This is especially important in the second semester where the RAs can make comparisons to past years and other areas in terms of how much discipline they are doing, how the floor is academically, etc. They can then alter their discipline style or redirect programming as is necessary. Seeing the information laid out for the past four or five years, and knowing how our population tends to “move” from our freshmen building to others, allows us to be more predictive because of the self iteration concept. At MACUHO where this was originally presented in November, I predicted that our number of students on the Dean’s list would top 100 even though that would be a significant increase. We actually had 105 students make the Dean’s list. The important thing to remember is that we say we are trying to be educational. Chaos theorists realize that no decision remains solely between the professional and an individual student. Every decision you make educates everyone on your campus and has importance beyond its boundaries. Residence Life departments are open systems, i.e., people graduate, transfer out, flunk out, or are terminated and are replaced with new students not previously in the system. However, the pool of potential new students for next year is a closed system. We cannot make students out of thin air. Your system is self-iterating. If those students who do well and who generally are not discipline issues are satisfied, they will speak to similar potential freshmen. Conversely, a student who is not going to class, using drugs or alcohol, and is not being held accountable not only creates an environment which causes those good students to dissuade their peers from coming to your institution; they also persuade other students who wish to behave in a like manner to matriculate. Thus your environment becomes a downward spiral. By understanding how your system acts and reacts you can influence the variables, which will increase stability and predictability. This will mean that overall retention and academics will go up and discipline will go down. However, because residence life systems are inherently chaotic you will not be able to predict precisely which students will have problems. Additionally, chaos means that there will be that occasional semester or year where nothing goes as well as it had been. Determining which chaos concept applies allows you to alter your programs or stay on course as is appropriate. Gleick, James. (1987). Chaos Making a New Science. New York. Penguin. About the Author Greg Spahr is currently the Assistant Director of Student Affairs at the Hazleton Campus of the Pennsylvania State University. He has been in the residence life field for about twenty years. He has also worked as an International Student Advisor, taught music, and coached collegiate fencing.