News & Values

Image featuring assorted students posing together during a BBQ event at Wilbur Field.

"Our new neighborhoods will be your Stanford homes — they’ll be where late-night conversations turn into lifelong friendships, and where you’ll create and continue traditions that become cherished across generations of students.”

— President Marc Tessier Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell

Read the ResX Announcement.

Members of XTRM perform a K-Pop dance number at the Asian American Community Welcome in Old Union Clubhouse.

What Does ResX Mean for Me?

Neighborhoods: When students accept their admissions offers from Stanford, they will be assigned to a neighborhood that they can call home for their four years with us. This is a place where they will live with their friends, where they will work together to build a lasting community, and where students have shared governing authority to help design and determine programming, theme housing, and their neighborhood’s community character.

Assignments: We will retire “the Draw” and move to a new seniority-based housing assignments model within neighborhoods that will allow students to easily stay with their friends and communities. Students who want a change can apply for a university theme house or “go abroad” to another neighborhood for a year or two!

All-Frosh Housing: We will now be able to fully meet the demand for all-frosh housing for our students. Each neighborhood will have all-frosh housing available! Frosh will also be able to pick environments like 4-class theme dorms, like the vibrant experiences students have in our ethnic theme dorms.

All-Soph Housing: The diminished opportunities for our current frosh to be on campus and build community during this difficult year are very much on our minds. We want to help next year’s sophomores to be able to have these experiences. So, in addition to all-frosh housing, we will be creating all-soph housing for rising sophomores to help them have a year with their class in the dorms.

reshman Javier Covarrubias poses for a photo with his parents Maria and Javier Covarrubias who are visiting from Chicago.

Core Principles

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: This is critical to the promise of democratic culture in higher education and to the opportunity for transformational change for student learning (AAC&U, 2015). Furthermore, this principle helps diminish the stereotype of the “Stanford student” or “Stanford culture” that may harm historically underserved communities on our campus (McNair, Bensimon, Piqueux, 2020). This value was added in 2021. The ResX task force believes that diversity and inclusion are embedded in each of the core values below. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to the ResX vision, which is why we made this a fourth core value.

Health & Well-Being: This principle encompasses health in the broadest sense, including students’ emotional, social, physical, intellectual, behavioral and spiritual health. It’s not only the absence of illness: health and well-being means the promotion, maintenance and flourishing of health indicators (Keys, 2007).

Community & Belonging: “Do I belong here?” is the core question that students ask again and again during their time on campus (Walton & Brady, 2017). Although “belonging” includes an individual’s sense of connection to and personal identification with the whole, “community” embraces an individual’s participation and belief in something larger than themselves. Creating and supporting a thriving community involves both collectively establishing a group’s values and norms and respecting the importance and responsibility of every individual in contributing to a shared vision and the daily life of that common good.

Intellectual & Personal Growth: Over the course of four years, students evolve considerably intellectually, personally, and socially. The residences are uniquely positioned to enable their growth because we recognize and support so much important learning that happens outside of the classroom.