Although sustained social relations between staff and students are built into the organization of English colleges of education, expansion tends to reduce social interaction and devalue the communal life of the colleges. A high level of social activity, universal participation and plentiful and close staff-student relations were evident at Worcester College of Education in 1961--a social structure produced by the interaction of a number of interrelated factors in the early history of the college. With physical expansion and accompanying changes in academic and professional work, these traditions came under strain although the values of the early period survived as references. The persistence of old expectations in a new situation helped in the search for remedies, yet worked to conserve customary (and inappropriate) ways of organizing social life. Students resisted reform until 1967 when a small minority was able to dominate student affairs because of lack of participation by the majority. By 1967, there was an apparent anomaly of changes in the roles which student and staff felt obliged to play in an expanding college, not accompanied by any change in the perception of the staff's role by students, or the students' role by staff. The increased size of the institution resulted in more formal and limited social relations between staff and students not merely because of few facilities conducive to intimacy but because the motivation to participate had gone. The research investigating this total pattern of interaction was conducted from 1961 to 1968. (JS)