ON CAMPUS, FINDING FACE TIME IN A VIRTUAL AGE

Austin, Tex.

WILL STOVALL, a history student in his fifth and final year as an
undergraduate at the University of Texas, returned from studying in
Mexico last fall determined to go to law school. In service of this
goal, he resolved to work harder, which meant he would have little
chance to see old friends or to acquire new ones, and that, in turn,
seemed to require a very particular kind of domestic arrangement.

"My thinking was that I wouldn't have time to make a social life, so
I needed to have people around," said Mr. Stovall, who looks as if he
has spent much of his life on the verge of hoisting a spinnaker.
Instead of renting an apartment, the custom for most seniors, he
moved into French House, one of 15 cooperative living facilities run
by students on the university's campus. "People shudder when I say
this," he said, "but a co-op is very much like a frat, without all
the fratty people."

After a fallow period in the 1980's and much of the 90's, residential
co-ops, where students cook and clean for themselves, have undergone
a renaissance at the University of Texas and on other campuses across
the country. About 10,000 students are living in co-ops in the United
States and Canada, said Jim Jones, former executive director of the
North American Students of Cooperation and a historian of trends in
communal living. That figure is roughly as high as it was during the
two liveliest periods of the co-op movement: the late 1940's, when
cooperative housing emerged as a cost-efficient alternative to
dormitory living for returning G.I.'s, and the late 1960's, when the
culture of shared ownership embodied the era's anti-authoritarian
sensibilities.

The current interest in co-ops stems in part from the economic
imperative that rising housing costs have wrought. But more than
anything else, students suggest, it has grown up in reaction to the
alienating aspects of modern campus life, where the increased
presence of technology, while enabling certain kinds of connection,
has had a hand in limiting others.

In Austin, the sense of social dispersion is especially acute. Fifty
thousand students attend the University of Texas, though it has room
for fewer than a fifth of them. This means that students seeking
rental apartments in the city's booming real estate market, where a
1,000-square-foot apartment near campus may command $2,000 a month,
are often forced to live 20 or 30 miles away, divorced from any
semblance of collective life. And dormitories at the university,
chief among them Dobie, a glass tower that reaches up into the city
skyline like the headquarters of a global bank, are typically likened
by students to nursing homes or prisons.

Close to 650 students now live in co-ops at the university, which has
one of the oldest and biggest systems in the United States, and the
operation is undergoing an expansion. College Houses, one of the two
nonprofit bodies that own and oversee co-ops in the area, is
developing a $7.8 million building that will accommodate an
additional 100 students. The project is set to receive financial
assistance from the city of Austin, which, in an unusual move, has
made funds available to promote student co-ops as part of a larger
affordable-housing initiative.

"I think that I felt lost at U.T.," said Mr. Stovall, who first lived
in a co-op in his sophomore year. "I remember at one point returning
to my dorm -- which is so big that it's rumored to have its own area
and ZIP codes -- and thinking that surely college would get better than this."

College co-ops, Texas' among them, began to spring up during the
Depression as a means of providing students with low-cost housing.
They have typically remained cheaper than dorms, but in recent years,
Mr. Jones said, he has seen students choose co-op life even on
campuses where the opposite is true.

"It's not just that people are arriving on big, anonymous campuses,
but the homes these kids are coming out of are more isolated," Mr.
Jones said. "One of the problems in American society today is that
people don't eat together anymore. It's the whole bowling alone
thing, and co-ops are one of the few places where people can really
come together."

The simple matter of a shared meal -- making it, clearing up --
undoubtedly draws students to co-op life, many of whom, particularly
at large universities like Texas, envision the alternative as a
sandwich eaten alone in a sterile apartment. Even at the university's
larger co-ops, which can accommodate more than 100 students, members
eat together every night, the rotating kitchen workers among them
spending up to four hours preparing dinner.

At Texas, no matter the size of a co-op, students must contribute
four to six hours of cooking, housework or building maintenance a
week. Assignments are made at the beginning of each semester when
students voice their preferences to a household "labor czar" who
works out an elaborate schedule and is responsible for coming down on
lax members and implementing a fine of $10 to $15 for every hour of
work missed. Students can pay a housemate $10 to do their work for
them, but few do because such behavior is considered distasteful and
"noncooperative."

For anyone with a certain idea about the free-ranging spirit of
American college life, the taste for bureaucracy and logistics among
co-op members can seem staggering. "One of the things that amazed me
when I came here," said Alan Robinson, the general coordinator of
College Houses, "was that so many students wanted to impose rules on
themselves."

In addition to a labor czar, each house has various managers and
officers, committee and subcommittee delegates, as well as a
representative who serves on the board of either College Houses or
the Inter-Cooperative Council, the other umbrella organization
through which the co-ops here function. In most houses, regular
meetings are held to discuss paint colors, parking, guest policy,
labor infractions and ways to market co-op life.

"It's work, it's a lot," acknowledged Ana Wolfowicz, a senior living
in Pearl Street, a 120-member co-op with its own pool. "But there's
not an R.A. telling me when to turn the lights out, and we decide if
we're going to buy a TV or organic coffee. No one is doing that for us."

Members can also decide whether the ornery or impertinent among them
should be submitted for review. The choice of one condiment brand or
another can prompt impassioned debate. Recently, at Pearl Street,
there was much discussion over how to handle students who might use
drugs. A few weeks ago one member called the police to report the
smell of marijuana in a nearby room.

Such an act would have seemed unimaginable 30 years ago on the
premises of Pearl Street, easily the most storied building on campus.
Originally constructed as a women's dormitory in 1961, the house,
called Mayfair House then, was home to Farrah Fawcett in her
undergraduate years. Later it was reinvented as a co-op known as the
Ark, where in the late 60's and the 70's beer replaced soda in the
vending machines. By the 80's drug habits were so pervasive in the
Ark that it was shut down in 1988 because of "anarchy and building
destruction," as the brochure for College Houses puts it.

French House, the co-op where Mr. Stovall lives, is in many ways
emblematic of a new ethos in student communal living, one in which
social hedonism, commitment to a vegetarian diet and a monolithic
political view no longer hold as the predominant conventions. French
House is also known as the carnivore's house; meat is served every
evening. Ten of its 20 residents attend the Hill Country Bible Church
nearby every Sunday. Dating within the house is discouraged. "The
stereotype is that we are hippies and drug addicts," said Patrick
King, an art student and one of Mr. Stovall's housemates. "We are
neither hippies nor drug addicts."

The new co-op that College Houses is about to build will rise seven
stories, with every two floors functioning as a co-op with its own
kitchen and the ground floor for mingling. Phillip Reed, a local
architect, found inspiration for the building in a giant jungle gym
he saw at the Burning Man festival, but the specifics are being
dictated by his client: a board of students who have asked for ample
outdoor space, common areas and courtyards where they can show movies
and watch bands. The building has been designed so that moving
through it will enhance sociability, because sociability is the
students' primary concern.

"Students now come to college with a whole set of different
expectations," Mr. Reed said. "They want a double bed, their own
bedroom, a walk-in closet" -- some of these amenities are available
in co-ops, some not -- "but what they don't want is forced isolation."

Nor, it seems, do they have much interest in the cool palette of
modern interior design and the lack of intimacy it implies. One way
that co-op members in Austin in 2006 seem similar to their
counterparts 30 years ago is their choice of appointment. Batik
thrives, so too Che posters, acid wall colors and sofas seemingly
rescued from meth labs. To visit the bedrooms in many houses is to
think one has stepped into a Tunisian massage parlor.

The co-op by way of Elle Decor apparently has yet to come; on the
other hand, graduation is a gateway to a lifetime of beige.