The most important book now available on residential college life is Mark B. Ryan's collection of essays A Collegiate Way of Living: Residential Colleges and a Yale Education (New Haven: Jonathan Edwards College, 2001). Harvard and Yale Universities began the modern tradition of residential colleges in the United States in the 1930s, consciously copying the earlier models of Oxford and Cambridge. Dr. Ryan's volume grew out of his many years of service as dean of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. If you read only one book about residential colleges, this is the one to read.

One thing this volume teaches is that the residential college is a portable idea, something that has been carried from place to place since its inception in thirteenth-century Europe. After his service at Yale, Ryan subsequently was instrumental in establishing the first residential college systems in Latin America. Seldom has anyone expressed so eloquently what this model of acaedemic community can contribute to the development and education of the self.