If some groups submitting proposals to the Five Principles Task Force have their way, Dartmouth may soon be joining many other Ivy League colleges in offering the option, or the requirement, of housing that concentrates first year students in specific residence halls.
Six proposals to the Task Force - those of the Social and Residential Life task force, Paleopitus, Five Principles Working Groups, Jeffrey DeWitt, Vicki Gist and Chris Chambers, Ricky Joshi '01 and Giavanna Munafo - proposed housing freshmen exclusively with members of their own class.
The Social and Residential Life task force - made up former Dean of the First Year Office Peter Goldsmith, former Acting Dean of Residential Life Mary Liscinsky, Associate Dean of the College Janet Terp, and Director of Residential Operations Woody Eckels - propose first year housing "on the belief that having a coordinated program for first year students can start the concept of seamless learning immediately, thereby establishing it as the norm for our students."
Paleopitus argues freshmen housing will give members of the first-year class access to control over programming, contact with members of their class, and a sense of community.
Paleopitus' recommendation also says freshmen housing should cut down disparities in housing quality.
The Five Principles Working Groups, chaired by Eric Buchman '00, Marc Fenigstein '01, Jeffrey B. Fine '99, Joshi, Tom Leatherbee '01, Melissa Maggio '99 and Jennifer Parkinson '99, suggest freshmen should be concentrated in dorms, but not put in exclusively first-year housing.
DeWitt, Gist and Chambers- area directors and acting assistant dean of Residential Life respectively- suggest students should have the option of first year housing.
In his proposal, Joshi lists what he feels are the negatives for upperclassmen mixing with first years. He says the system encourages "mere acquaintance building" and creates "interest-based and cultural segregation."
Munafo, head of the Womens Resource Center, proposes not only first year housing but linking that housing with freshmen seminars and/or a new first year "Community at Dartmouth" course to hall clusters or house residency.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Goldsmith elaborated on some of the advantages in concentrated freshmen housing.
"There are the obvious advantages in enabling a class of students to get to know one and other, to bond with one another," Goldsmith said. "Then there are the less obvious advantages - the ability to target programming, including academic programming, at first-years."
The ability to program for freshmen in a dorm setting instead of just a classroom is another advantage, Goldsmith said. This programming could include freshmen seminars, or a class teaching first year students how to use Dartmouth's academic resources to their fullest.
Resistance to the idea of concentrated first-year housing often comes from students who say mixing with upperclassmen in the residence halls is a significant part of the freshmen year Dartmouth experience, Goldsmith said.
However, he said many people he talked to say that while there were upperclassmen on their hall, they did not mix socially with them.
The proposal to the Task Force was made in the spirit of "suggesting a good and effective way of concentrating efforts at helping students become acclimated to the Dartmouth environment," Goldsmith said, and as a result he could not comment extensively on details of what a first-year dorm, cluster or system might look like.
However, Goldsmith did say undergraduate advisors, or "some kind of student residential staff" would be needed. He also suggested the idea of an increased graduate student presence in the dorms.
Chambers submitted two proposals that advocated concentrating freshmen in their own housing. "I imagine there's a perceived stigma around concentrating first-years," he said. "I'm imagining not throwing first years in a building and saying 'That's yours.' I'm talking about residential programming for first-year students, really thinking about what first-years need and desire for the transition to college."
Chambers is looking to create a community of first-year students and agrees with Goldsmith, with whom he worked on one report, that while many say "valuable interaction" with upperclassmen does occur, the reality is different and freshmen wind up socializing with other freshmen even in mixed dorms.
Chambers cited the River and Choate clusters as examples of dorms that already have a heavy concentration of freshmen due to housing requests from upperclass students. However, one rumored idea- putting all the freshmen in those clusters- is not being debated right now.
Chambers said that the future of these clusters is uncertain itself, as some proposals in the Task Force report advocate their abolishment.
"All we can do is put some ideas forward and see where we go," he said.
Like Goldsmith, Chambers said he feels UGAs or other upperclass students would be a valuable part of the freshmen housing concepts. "It's very important for there to be peer student leadership and advising no matter what [the dorms] look like."
Chambers said peer advising in residences is a "critical thing that we don't do really well here" and that it would be important in upperclass as well as freshmen housing options.
The Pelton report
These proposals to the Task Force are not the first time the idea of freshmen year housing has been debated at the College.
In 1994, then-Dean of the College Lee Pelton and the Committee on the First Year Experience recommended in a later-amended proposal that freshmen live in three primarily freshman residence clusters with Senior Faculty Fellows living nearby.
Freshmen would be housed according to their English and freshmen seminar courses and the Faculty Fellows would help coordinate the cluster programming in an attempt to bring more of the College's intellectual life into the College's residential life.
In an attempt to alleviate instability in upperclass housing, upperclassmen would have been able to affiliate with one cluster and live in it for the entirety of their Dartmouth careers, under this plan.
However, Pelton's report was greatly changed after student displeasure erupted. The Conservative Union at Dartmouth collected more than 500 student signatures on a petition against the proposal for all-freshmen housing.
In his final report to the Board of Trustees, Pelton called instead for the creation of a single "mixed-class cluster" that would have a dean, senior faculty member and advisor as well as additional programming space.
East Wheelock became this "mixed-class cluster.
Goldsmith said that because of the student disapproval that greeted Pelton's original proposals, he assumed freshmen-only housing would be a dead issue today.
"Five years ago although there was some support, a lot of the sentiment was against" freshmen housing, Goldsmith said.
"In the past year there has been a series of students who independent of one and other have come forward suggesting we consider freshmen housing," he said.
Student opinion today
While proposals and some students find freshmen housing a viable option, many others feel freshmen housing would not be a welcome addition to the Dartmouth experience.
Also included in the Task Force report is a proposal from the 2002 Class Council listing the results from a freshmen class survey on the question of first year housing.
Out of 227 responses, 130 freshmen were against the idea of exclusively freshmen dorms while 97 were for it. Also included in the proposal were anonymous comments for and against the idea.
Josh Warren, president of the Class of 2002 said the Council thought this was an important issue to address and that he was not surprised by the mixed survey results.
Freshmen housing "is a really personal experience," Warren said.
While Warren said he liked living in the mixed dorm Hitchcock during his freshman year, he feels future freshmen classes would be better off with a "more unified first year experience."
"Right now there's only the UGA group, the seminar and English 5," Warren said. "I'm not entirely sure what should be done, but there should be more cohesion."
Nicole Leiser '02 lived in the Choates her freshman year and said she liked the heavy concentration of freshmen in the dorm. However, she said she would not have liked the dorm as much if it had been exclusively first-year students.
"The great thing about Dartmouth is that there are almost no classes with all freshmen and there shouldn't be dorms that are all freshmen," she said. "It's a terrible idea."
One anonymous '02 who replied to the council survey and is quoted in the Task Force report said "I don't think any of the sophomores [in a dorm] mix with the freshmen. It's just odd. I would rather be surrounded with freshmen who are more willing to go out and make friends."
First years at other schools
Surrounding freshmen with others just acclimating to college life is what the other Ivies and many comparable schools across the country do.
Dartmouth is one of only two Ivies not to provide an extensively, or solely, freshman dormitory system.
At Princeton, freshmen are housed together with sophomores in five small "colleges." In 1994, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Housing Joseph Plafka told The Dartmouth that this college system was set up to acclimate "first and second-year students to the rigors of Princeton and establish a sense of community within their respective classes."
After sophomore year, many juniors become affiliated with eating clubs, organizations that have houses and provide meals for members.
At Yale, freshmen live together in 12 residential colleges on the "old campus," while at Columbia and Duke all freshmen are housed together as well.
Harvard houses freshmen in residence halls before they group with friends to join upperclass houses their sophomore year.
Students have mixed responses to the Harvard system, Harvard sophomore Kirsten Studlien said. "It's a weird situation, depending on what dorm you're in," she said. "Some people are really tight with their dorm but it makes it hard to meet people other than the ones you're living with."
In addition, Studlien says eating in a freshman-only dining hall and living in exclusively with freshmen makes it more difficult to form close friendships with upperclassmen.
However, Jordan Vega, a recent Wesleyan graduate said his first year-only dorm was one of the most positive experiences in his college career. The exclusively freshmen dorm is one of Wesleyan's many freshmen housing choices, he said, but it gets more and more crowded every year.
The University of Pennsylvania is the one Ivy currently trying to make the transition from exclusively freshmen housing to residential life consisting of mixed classes.
The "College House System" Penn has started means that formerly freshmen-dominated residential quadrangles are being targeted more to upperclassmen, with more singles being offered.
Penn student Adrienne Moore, who was a freshmen when the residential life changes began, said she loved living in a mixed dorm, although the majority of her close friends in the dorm were other freshmen.
