In the old days of Dartmouth, housing was relatively simple. The College business administration ran housing, providing each of the male students with a room based on what he could afford.
Wealthier students lived in larger rooms, with fireplaces and other such amenities while students of lesser means lived in smaller, more barren rooms.
College students often were able to live in the same room all four years, surrounded by the same hallmates.
But change came throughout the 1960s when the College gradually expanded its enrollment, and rooms and beds were needed to accommodate the new numbers of students.
Then many of the rooms on campus became more "compressed," according to Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco. "Singles were turned into doubles, and doubles into triples," she said.
With housing on campus becoming more crowded, it became increasingly difficult to simply provide each student with one room for the four years he was on campus.
Then came coeducation in 1972. With it came the logistical difficulties of the Dartmouth Plan, as well as the vastly more complicated issues of having a student body that was no longer entirely male. Finding housing for students at the now-coed College became an incredibly complex process.
The dawn of ORL
The Office of Residential Life did not exist until around 1982, according to Turco, and it was created in the aftermath of coeducation to make the campus an environment more accepting of women.
For 10 years after the decision to admit women in 1972, the College received bad press -- "unflattering articles" in numerous national newspapers and magazines about the "very hostile environment" on campus towards female students, Turco said.
One article's headline said women at the College were "hanging on by a jockstrap" and that both the residential and fraternity systems were anti-female, she said.
The College, concerned that the negative public image would hamper efforts to increase the female applicant pool, decided it needed to take action. By the late 1970s, the Board of Trustees resolved to rectify the situation, Turco said.
In 1981, when Ed Shanahan became the new dean of students -- the position now referred to as dean of the College -- Dartmouth started to develop the housing system as it is today.
Shanahan introduced the concept of "residential life" to what had previously been "barracks for students," Turco said.
Among Shanahan's proposals was the idea of "clusters" of various dormitories around campus. Each cluster would have a separate identity and its own social activities.
Another of his proposals was to add new beds to relieve overcrowding in other dormitories.
Shanahan received $20 million from the College to accomplish his goals. Of this amount, $9 million went to his biggest project, the construction of the East Wheelock cluster in 1987.
The new buildings in the East Wheelock project were in many ways a vast improvement on the dorms of the time. Here, the buildings had suites, small kitchen areas and study lounges.
The remainder of the funds went to renovating other College residential areas. Another $9 million went into renovating the other residence halls, some of which were in especially dilapidated condition.
Shanahan used the money to make substantial physical safety improvements, as well as to create study lounges, social spaces and kitchen areas. However, these improvements also required the loss of some rooms that had formerly held beds.
It was during this construction activity that Shanahan's cluster idea was made a physical reality through various structural modifications.
An example of these physical improvements can be seen in the three Fayerweather buildings. The previously separate buildings were connected by partially-underground social spaces during this renovation project.
With the remaining $2 million, the College purchased and renovated several of the Greek houses, including Chi Heorot and Alpha Chi Alpha fraternities.
With the vast improvements in the physical state of the buildings and with Shanahan's new ideas that extended beyond merely finding a place for students to sleep, the housing administration needed to change.
It became apparent that a "deanery" was required to preside over and ensure the new policies functioned properly, Turco said. And so the dean of Residential Life position was born.
The student staff for the new Office of Residential Life was built from an institution already in place: the Undergraduate Advisor program.
The UGA program had been initiated in the late 1970s to "help create a more civil environment" in the residence halls, Turco said. The UGAs were also created to provide a peer resource for new students.
The College implemented Area Coordinators to supervise social activity in each of the clusters. In addition, the College created the position of Area Director, one for the east and one for the west side of the campus. The Area Director serves to "back up" the ACs, Turco said.
Along with implementing the residential life program as we know it, the College's decision to go coed eventually led to an improvement in residential life at the College. But another consequence of coeducation would prove to be a source of numerous problems for ORL -- the D-plan.
D-Plans wreak havoc
The number of times a student must change rooms due to the D-Plan is "very disruptive to the overall quality of the undergraduate experience" at the College, Turco said.
Students must change rooms an average of six to nine times during their time at the College compared to the three or four at other colleges, she said.
According to Housing Assignments Administrator Lynn Rosenblum, the College has always made it a policy to guarantee housing to first-year students. In addition, ORL guarantees housing for those transfer and exchange students who request it.
ORL "cannot, with the D-Plan, guarantee housing to upper-class students," Rosenblum said.
After considering and trying several proposals, ORL decided to allow freshmen to stay in the same room automatically during their first three terms. Also, ORL decided to give the senior class the top priority in housing.
The result, however, created a "tumultuous" situation for the sophomore and junior classes each year. Turco said it varies from year to year which class of the two is "shortchanged" more in terms of housing.
Random lotteries
When former housing dean William Crooker arrived on campus in 1954, there were more than 100 different rates for rooms on campus.
"The north side was less expensive than the south side, because on the south side you get more sun in the windows," Crooker said in a recent interview with The Dartmouth. "We cut them way back."
Once the College realized class and income disparities on campus were reflected in the housing system by the differences in quality and rent rates of rooms in various residence halls, the College decided to drop the varied room rates and have a relatively flat rate for all the rooms on campus.
By the time Crooker retired in 1983, there were only three or four different room rates on campus, he said.
At present, Turco said, there is no more than $50 difference in rent per term between the best and worst rooms on campus.
Since students could no longer choose rooms based on what they could afford, a new system had to be developed. ORL introduced a lottery priority number system for housing.
According to Crooker, this random lottery number was instituted back in either 1981 or 1982. The housing office generated the random numbers through the Kiewit Computation Center.
The priority number system has had many faces over the years. Rosenblum said that until the fall of 1995, students were actually assigned two housing priority numbers.
One number, the "cluster number" was randomly assigned to each student out of the entire student body. The other number, the "class number" was assigned randomly according to the student's class.
The cluster number was used in deciding what priority students had for the various residence halls on campus, while the class number was used as a priority for the various types of rooms, Rosenblum said.
This system had several serious flaws, including the possibility that any upperclassman, regardless of year, could be wait listed, sometimes more than once.
Also, there were "very, very few students" who actually got their first, second or even third choices of cluster, Rosenblum said. In addition, a student did not always get the roommates he or she requested.
The solution was the current system: a single priority number by class, engineered so that a student could only be wait listed once, if at all.
In the old system, location had been the driving force for room assignment. In the new system, room type was more important.
A more recent addition to the priority number system is the grouping option, first instituted for this past Fall term. The grouping option allows groups of up to eight friends to apply for rooms in the same building, often in the same hallway.
So far, the new procedure has been "going very well," Rosenblum said, but this past fall it worked better for juniors than sophomores, because of the juniors' higher priority numbers.
Rosenblum said she hopes the grouping option will be used even more effectively once students figure out ways to fill the rooms in their "group" left empty by friends who go off campus with other friends returning to campus.
Along with disrupting residential life at the College, the D-plan also leads to disparities between the number of students on campus each term.
Of all the terms of the academic year, Fall term is usually when the most students are on, and this leads to problems.
Fall term crunches
Throughout the years, finding housing during Fall term for all students who want to be on campus has been a perennial problem for College officials.
Some factors have been the recent decline in off-campus program participation and the decision to move Greek rush from freshman spring to sophomore fall in the early 1990s.
Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg told The Dartmouth in 1994 that the increasing geographic diversity of students at the College has brought more students from warmer areas of the country who might prefer fall weather to winter.
Some Fall terms have been worse than others. In the falls of 1993 and 1994, ORL had to house some students in interesting places when not enough rooms were available.
In 1993, more than 370 students were wait-listed for Fall-term housing.
After many students canceled their housing contracts, the 13 students still on the wait list started the Fall term living in makeshift dorm rooms in the lounges of Smith and Topliff residence halls. However, 10 of the students quickly canceled their housing contracts with ORL and found places to live elsewhere. The office was able to find rooms for the remaining three students by the end of the first week of school.
In 1994, the housing crisis was repeated, but on a much larger scale. This time, more than 400 students were wait listed for Fall term housing. ORL, for the first time in its history, had to write to 200 members of the Classes of 1996 and 1997 and tell them there was no way to provide them housing.
The office included in its letter to the 200 students a list of available rental properties, only a few of which were in Hanover. ORL also offered financial incentives to many of the students to get them to change their D-plans.
The incentives included discounted rent and increased priority for housing and classes for students who changed their D-plans, as well as the option of increasing room occupancies in exchange for discounted rent, Turco said.
By the start of the 1994 Fall term, only 24 students remained without housing. The College opened up several faculty apartments to house 16 of the students.
For the remaining eight students, ORL once again converted dorm lounges into temporary rooms.
Elijah Cocks '97 was wait-listed for that fall, and although he and some friend had looked at off-campus options, he decided he wanted to live on campus.
He and another member of the 1997 class were placed into a dorm lounge in Smith Hall.
"It wasn't so bad," Cocks said. There was no phone outlet, but ORL had furnished the room with a wardrobe and beds, and there were Internet access ports for the students' computers.
Above all, Cocks said, the makeshift room was very large. He recalled being able to play frisbee in the lounge with his roommate. "I didn't know how long I'd be in there, so I bought a couch," Cocks said. One week later, he was told he was being moved into a single in Ripley Hall. He had to return his new couch.
The seven other students also got singles within a week, Cocks said.
One change implemented to prevent similar problems was the "provisional D-Plan," Rosenblum said.
Under this plan, students who wish to change their D-Plan to include a Fall term on-campus that they had previously listed as off must first find housing. Otherwise, they are given "provisional status," meaning they have lowest priority for Fall-term housing.
