I hoped it was too early in the term to have negative things to say about Dartmouth, but I was wrong.
One of the more pressing problems with our academic institution is homelessness.
Don't struggle to recall where you saw the last bum on Main Street this morning. It's not the type of homelessness that comes with losing your house and panhandling for food. I am talking about homeless students.
Last spring, I got my housing priority number, which was well over 3,000. Figuring I was in for a one-room quad in the River, I put the card aside and forgot about it, finally getting the application in late.
The next thing I knew it was August, and a letter arrived from ORL saying ' I am paraphrasing, of course ' "Tough luck for you, kiddo, but you'll have to find some place else to live this fall .... There's just no room for you."
As it turns out, several people (including myself) are homeless, as far as campus housing is concerned.
But wait, there's more. When we look at how ORL housed those just ahead of me on the wait list, we see they've resorted to ghetto measures: desperate pleas to let a third person move into a double if the rent is discounted, turning singles into doubles, and turning study lounges (like the excellent one in the Gold Coast) into rooms.
Also, ORL usually keeps twenty rooms on standby for emergencies. This year they only have five. Has something gone awry?
I would like to blame the '97s, but I won't. Frankly, they're bound to have enough problems of their own. But who do we blame? The administration? Quite possibly.
It is obvious that there are too many people at the school. When you subtract beds from students and get a positive number, that's just too many people.
The solution is not to tell the extras "tough luck," and shift the burden off-campus. That just skirts the problem.
Furthermore, if housing is overburdened, then it follows that the academic plant might be too, resulting in larger classes. This is no solution.
What we need is definite action, not just expedient, makeshift solutions. Cramping more people into existing rooms is a temporary remedy. What high school student would be attracted to a school where doubles are triples, singles are doubles, lounges are now rooms and there is a chance of not getting a place to live as an upperclassman?
We must challenge the administration to adopt a stated policy. Either it needs to declare that the larger classes are staying, and extra facilities will be built to accommodate them' that the face of the College is changing.
Or, that the population will be reduced with the future classes such that the College will return to its previous size.
Or lastly that this fall is a fluke in which too many people decided to be on campus, and that this problem will not happen again: the rooms will return to their normal occupancies, everyone will get housed and we will get our study areas returned to us.
As the Class of 1997 shows, Dartmouth has done an excellent job at attracting extremely bright people. However, there are people who get paid many thousands of dollars a year to do a job which they have failed to do: to make sure that the facilities of the school are not overburdened, and that its students will not be left out in the open, searching for places to live in Quechee, Vt., which is a real hike for those of us who are car-less.
The simple truth is that not every bright person is meant to be at Dartmouth. In fact, we only have room for about 1,070 of them a year.
We are at a fork in the road: either we must decide to take in more of them, and accommodate them with new buildings, or do a better job at predicting how many will choose to matriculate, and keeping the number small enough to keep the College small.
