It seems that this year, God is on the side of
the admissions office. He gave them two or three weeks of sultry weather right at the time when admitted students were investigating whether, in Hanover, wet hair really would freeze on your head on the way to class. Fortunately for our U.S News & World Report's "yield" statistic , the 70-degree temperature and healthy crop of Frisbees, footballs and skimpily clad sunbathers on the Green disabused them of any illusions of bad weather here. God knows they'll need it next year -- the higher that "yield" of admitted students goes, the higher the probability that sophomores and freshmen will be camping on the Green this fall. Heck, it'll be a trippie reunion, complete with tents and sleeping bags and questionable food catered this time by DDS!
Now that the admitted students are gone, however, we return to a spring that was much like the winter that was much like the fall -- it rains, sleets, snows and generally does the exact opposite of what's appropriate for the season. I'm glad I'm not going to be here for the six feet of unseasonable snow that will be Hanover's summer destiny. With outdoor sports curtailed, I've had plenty of time in my room contemplating room draw and wondering about our housing policies at Dartmouth.
We're in trouble here, no doubt about it. Something is very wrong when the College can't assign students with low priority numbers housing until a month before the term begins. The worse issue is that of the glaring inequities in quality among dormitories here. At the same time as the College built the prefabricated Tree Houses, they erected the McCulloch dormitory, outfitted with private bathrooms, a laundry elevator and study lounges. The latter was constructed at a cost of over $100,000 per bed.
I'm not particularly concerned about the cost -- it's perfectly fine that my home in suburban Yardley, Penn., also cost $100,000 per bed, yet also boasts a three-car garage, a guest room, three more bathrooms, centralized air conditioning, a gourmet kitchen and orders of magnitude more space than a McCulloch quad. Nor am I concerned about the fact that East Wheelock is essentially a method for the College to create a society that conforms to the lifestyle that it favors. I am merely concerned about the fact that we're all forced to subsidize the luxury that the residents of McCulloch enjoy. Dartmouth could have probably gotten more for its money than it got with McCulloch -- spending the money on other aspects of campus life that would have added to the Dartmouth experience.
The first main issue that I have is with regard to the $100,000 per bed cost. Anyone who has taken a finance class knows that a project costs an entity the prevailing rate of interest if its financing is spread out over an infinite period of time. That is, the privilege of sleeping students at McCulloch's scale costs about $6,000 a year in perpetuity at a 6-percent cost of capital. Is this cost passed on to the residents of McCulloch? No. Nobody would dare charge a student $1,500 extra per term simply for the cost of living in new housing. Yet at the same time, nobody else's housing at Dartmouth would cost anything near $6,000 per year per bed to finance. In effect, Dartmouth ensures that other students who live in housing less opulent than McCulloch subsidize that cost either by their fees or by forgoing the investment income that is tied up in McCulloch. Such an inequity is not what a community of equals is all about.
Worse yet is the fact that the money spent on McCulloch could have been more wisely spent on bringing all Dartmouth housing to a higher level of quality. I've touched on the lack of bike racks before, but I could go on about the inadequate bathrooms in Topliff's basement, the creaky electrical situation around campus and the intolerably small amount of storage space. Several million dollars in improvements would bring us all closer to the gold standard of East Wheelock that the College loves to showcase for prospective students.
Even more disappointing is the tiny benefit that McCulloch provides for its spectacular cost. How much better, on margin, is the utility directly or indirectly attached to living in McCulloch? If we give each student a 20 percent better living experience on average, that's only 20 percent added on to 123 students' lives and paid for out of $189 by every student at Dartmouth. Is it worthwhile to have these luminaries with extra study room around us? Should we subsidize some sort of cost that they are bearing? No. The College should no doubt have different styles of living. What is wrong is the variation in luxury of living.
Our housing inequity is not solved by juxtaposing McCulloch and Tree Houses. It costs tremendous amounts of money that could have been better spent improving other dormitories. It also introduces forced and subsidized inequity into a system. Even if each student paid the finance charges for his housing unit, the College would be divided along financial lines. In the case of McCulloch, the verdict is definitely that the housing is separate but unequal.
