Housing: that bizarre, wonderful, sublime need of human beings which demands that we spend our days and nights, especially during cold New Hampshire winters, under a motley collection of walls and a roof. Throughout history the powerful have built themselves coliseums, palazzi, and College President's Mansions, while the weak have been consigned to caves, tenements and the Choates. But the Dartmouth administration, in its infinite munificence, has seen fit to push the housing paradigm into uncharted territory by implementing a housing policy so incompetent that for the 2000-2001 academic year nearly 400 students will be denied housing.
There are fewer than 2,700 beds in college-owned halls, plus approximately 800 beds in CFS and affinity houses; the rest of the students live off campus. In the past, due to student desire to live in their CFS houses or in Hanover, the housing process functioned reasonably well to insure that in most cases, students who wanted to live in college dorms would get the chance to do so. They might have had to move around term to term and live in closet-sized singles in much-hated clusters, but they did not have to sleep in the gutters. Seeing as how that situation wasn't painful enough, the Office of Residential Life and the College administration have decided to make matters worse.
Parkhurst's campaign consists of a vice-like approach: increasing the size of the student body while decreasing the availability of housing, both on campus and off. Through its lackey McNutt, the administration has continuously and systematically bloated the class size to just under 1,100 students, far more than Dartmouth's infrastructure can support. Not being content with this slow-and-steady approach, this year the administration, with the aid of the Office of Residential Life, has struck a coup de grace, a.k.a. Room Draw.
This new system, whose ostensible goal is to increase student satisfaction and which on the surface seems plausibly designed to do so, merely aggravates the housing crunch. A major side effect of room draw is that many super-seniors, seniors and juniors, who can now choose exactly the rooms they want, have decided to live in college housing rather than off-campus. As a result, the students with the lowest housing numbers, who are all sophomores and who would otherwise never consider living off-campus next year, now find themselves frantically searching Hanover real estate listings for a place to live come September. Thus the net effect of room draw is to force precisely those students who most desire college housing out into the cold.
As much as I enjoy excoriating bureaucratic foolishness, however, words won't build new dorms. Here then, are my humble suggestions for dealing with the housing mess:
- Decrease class size.
The most obvious solution to the lack of available housing is to reduce the number of students at Dartmouth. The current class sizes of nearly 1,100 are too large; this school is bursting at the seams. However, since fewer students means less money rolling in to fund the Trustees' campaign for world domination, this will never happen. Better to let sophomores live in the gutters -- after all, what will they do, transfer to Harvard? We all know Dartmouth students aren't "high ability."
- Build more housing.
While the administration and the trustees have pledged to do just that, I have serious issues with their proposals. They have not indicated a timetable for building, nor have they disclosed any concrete plans. Their latest avant garde brainchild, McCulloch Hall in the East Wheelock cluster, will have a negligible impact on the impending mass homelessness, since the architects were preoccupied with "increasing student interaction" by putting sinks in the hallways rather than with maximizing the number of beds. And speaking of East Wheelock
- Increase occupation of East Wheelock.
Much as I appreciate the need for 300 square foot singles as a way of making the Trustees' precious cluster system attractive, it seems somehow wrong to give hotel-style rooms to those students who sell out to this failed social engineering experiment while forcing half the sophomore class out into the Hanover rental market. Last time I was in the East Wheelock cluster, on a Saturday night at 9 p.m., Brace Commons was dead as a doornail -- one lonely soul diligently studied to the haunting sounds of eerie piano music wafting through the halls. Such glorious social interaction will surely survive the devastating blow of putting a second body into a 300 square foot room.
Of course, I highly doubt that the administration will address the current housing crisis of their own accord. Perhaps this will change when they receive an inundation of angry parental phone calls next week. If not, I suggest pitching a tent on the Green -- the location can't be beat! Bathroom facilities are conveniently close by in Parkhurst Hall, although whether the Trustees will allow their use by students remains unclear, as the sinks are not in the hallway and consequently social interaction will not be up to par with the lofty standards of Dartmouth University.
