The Committee on the First-Year Experience is due to make its recommendations at the end of the term. It is my hope that the creation of freshmen dorms is not one of them.
There are a number of defects in the freshman year experience, but the lack of a first-year dormitory is not one of them. One proposal that is promising, for instance, is to have the freshman seminar professors act as advisors to their respective students, and doing away with the random advising system in place now. If this proposal were to come true, first-year students would be able to have regular, meaningful contact with their advisor, not a rushed meeting in which a card gets signed and that's about it.
As for the question of freshmen dorms, I wonder if anyone on the First-Year Committee knows that the lack of such housing is actually one of the big attractions to Dartmouth. I remember hearing it from my tour guide, from my student hosts and during prospective weekend, always mentioned in a positive manner. As a prospective first-year student, I remember resenting the implication that I needed to be herded into some special corner of campus so that I wouldn't pose too much of a bother to upperclassmen as a result of my blatant cluelessness. In short, having all coed, class-integrated dorms is one of Dartmouth's selling points and should not be changed by the sequestering of freshmen.
Apparently, the other half of the proposal is to put the first-year students into the least desirable dorms. I assume this means the River Cluster, the Lodge and the Choates. Upperclassmen may jump up and down with glee at the thought of never having to live in one of these residences again, but let's think for a minute: is this really how we want to welcome students to Dartmouth? The housing priority system is and will probably always be flawed, but it is not fair to pass on all the defects to the incoming class.
The problem with residential life here is that there is not enough quality housing, not that freshmen and upperclassmen are having problems coexisting. I cannot believe that with all this talk of expanding the north campus, there are currently no plans to build a new residence hall there. One wonders to where we are expanding if there are not enough places for students to live. This is a separate question, of course, but as things stand now, it is only fair that all classes share the wealth as far as housing is concerned.
Dean of the College Lee Pelton, in an interview in the April 20 issue of The Beacon, was asked if he thinks affinity housing segregates the campus. He responded by citing a number of statistics that show that only a small fraction of minority students actually live in affinity housing, and that therefore, affinity housing does not really segregate the campus. But the most interesting part of his argument was this: Pelton seems to think that Greek houses, by virtue of their selection of members who then become residents, can be considered a form of affinity housing as well. If we are going to attack one form of affinity housing, he implies, let's attack the other.
Fine. Affinity housing for minority students is not assumed to be a problem, because it involves such a small segment of the eligible people. Perhaps Greek houses are a bigger problem in this view because of the larger proportion of predominantly white students involved. Wouldn't the creation of a freshman dorm, then, be a huge problem in terms of segregating the campus, because it would involve 100 percent of that segment of the population?
The point is, freshmen at Dartmouth are already isolated enough. They are excluded from entering Greek houses, where the majority of campus looks for parties, until freshman winter. They are prohibited from joining the Greek system until sophomore fall. These policies have the arguably desirable effect of forcing all the freshmen to have their own parties and get to know each other. Granted, this has become much harder to do with bans on common sources in residential halls, but I'm sure that first-year students will continue to find ways to meet each other in a relaxed social setting.
Part of the fun freshman year was traipsing around finding parties in dorms all around campus. Remember Odin's (Wed. night) in Russell Sage, and all those parties in Topliff Basement? I've spoken to friends at other campuses and all of them have marveled at how much fun the Dartmouth first-year experience seems to be. Nearly all of them recognize that not being confined to freshmen dorms has something to do with it.
One other thing: it has been argued on this page that the establishment of freshmen dorms would be a good idea because as things stand now, the contact with upperclassmen is by and large negative. The argument is that freshmen living in close contact with upperclassmen only pick up the apathy and anti-intellectualism of their slightly older peers. Perhaps there is a grain of truth to this: after all, the defining experience of freshman year is finding out where you fit into life at this college.
But I would argue that, without the advent of freshmen dorms, both apathy and anti-intellectualism have been decreasing at Dartmouth in the past few years. Is it me, or is the library much more crowded today than it was when we seniors first arrived? One needs only look at the latest admissions statistics to realize that this place is becoming harder to get into, and that a higher caliber of student is being accepted. This is where the apathy and anti-intellectualism associated with Dartmouth will ultimately be solved: by admitting a higher caliber of student, not by shuttling them off to a "special" dorm.
In the end, while the first-year experience could stand some changes, an exclusively first-year dorm should not be one of them. Let's not change Dartmouth for the sake of change. I for one have never heard a disgruntled freshman say, "Gee, if only we had our own dorms..." or "If only we could get away from these blasted upperclassmen..." If anything, freshmen consistently appear to be happy to be integrated on campus, and usually profess a desire to meet as many upperclassmen as possible.
I have, however, heard first-year students say: "Why do I have a Film Studies prof as my advisor when I want to be an English major?" or "How am I ever going to keep up with all my work?" The key to improving the first-year experience at Dartmouth is lending more of a hand to students in the academic arena, in which many students feel lost.
In the social arena, too, there is room for improvement, but help in this regard need not be targeted solely to freshmen. The rest of campus could benefit from increased and varied social programming outside of the Greek system. But the proposal of segregating freshmen from upperclassmen is at best, unnecessary; at worst, it is insulting to Dartmouth upperclassmen. We're not all so bad. It just seems that the last thing we need at this college are any more divisions.
