Since the late nineteenth century, a number of American universities - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the Claremont Colleges, and the University of California at Santa Cruz - have attempted to organize students and faculty into small undergraduate residential colleges similar to those at Oxford and Cambridge. Proponents of these projects believed that the residential college system would foster academic and intellectual values while countering what they saw as the deleterious effects on undergraduate education of the expansion of the university and the increasing research orientation of its faculty. This book tells the story of these efforts - some successful and some not - adding a new chapter to the history of higher education in America.