Lately, a lot of conversations, community meetings and even newspaper editorials on this campus have centered on the recent report of the Committee on the First-Year Experience. And rightly so, for the proposals and suggestions in it could very well have a major impact on life at Dartmouth.
However, at the same time this idealistic attempt to transform the College is being debated, another, more pragmatic series of changes is being quietly instituted: The Office of Residential Life's short-term efforts to prevent housing crunches, at least until a long-term solution can be found.
Both of these are well-meaning attempts to improve the College's residential experience; however, the juxtaposition of such contradictory policies seems destined to create disruption and inconsistency.
The First-Year plan seeks to revive the sense of community and closeness among dorm residents through a number of proposed changes in the current housing policies.
Today, for example, upperclassmen are for the most part scattered randomly throughout the dorms. Because students can pull in only three cluster-mates, dorms are often full of small groups of upperclass friends which do not necessarily interact or bond with one another. Since those outside of one's pull-in group are often strangers, upperclassmen tend to stick to their established social lives and patterns, hanging out with old friends from other dorms rather than new people in their own dorms.
This is not to say that there are no examples of dorm unity -- just that there is nothing in today's housing system to ensure it. In the old days, when upperclassmen had the option of staying in the same cluster year after year, there was plenty of dorm unity as students got to know each other well and chose with whom to live. The First-Year plan would return us to that system, if and when it is implemented.
In the meantime, there is ORL's new housing-shortage-inspired policy, which is in effect for next year and presumably until whenever the First-Year plan is implemented. In its quest for maximum efficiency rather than quality, the new policy happens to directly contradict the First-Year plan's goals.
Instead of keeping more dorm-mates together and preserving the unity and bonds that are formed through sharing common residential experiences, the new plan will create only disunity and disarray. For the sake of streamlined housing (and, for many, streamlined denial of housing), not only will it not allow students to choose the same cluster over and over, but it won't even allow them to directly choose their cluster at all.
In the new assignment process, ORL will allow no cluster pull-ins and will consider the room types requested over cluster preferences, going by the dubious rationale that giving students the type of room they requested is the most important goal -- even if it means randomly spreading friends all over campus and creating dorms full of strangers who have nothing in common but similar housing numbers. Students who want to live near their friends will no longer even have the option of taking a less-desirable room in order to do so.
The random dispersal of people that this policy creates can only lead to less, not more, community and friendship than exists under the current policy. Temporarily at least, ORL has managed to pre-empt and subvert the First-Year plan's attempts to encourage and increase the sense of community in the dorms even before it has received adequate consideration.
This inconsistency of policies is foolish. If the College really feels that the First-Year plan is an appropriate way to reform the housing system (which many students would disagree with), then it should now be actively considering that plan rather than enacting a temporary policy which contradicts it. If and when the First-Year plan does replace ORL's new plan, the housing system will have to be overhauled yet another time, causing even more disruption and confusion than necessary.
