Dean of Residential Life Marty Redman's announcement this week that room draw will be closed to seniors after 400 of them have received housing requires examination on two dimensions -- the sensibility of the policy and the efficacy of its implementation.
As far as the policy itself is concerned, the Office of Residential Life has created a solution to correct the imbalance of seniors living on-campus following the construction of the McLaughlin Cluster and Fahey and McClane residence halls, which kept ORL from making good on its guarantee to house all sophomores during the last room draw cycle.
Redman's campus-wide mailing, which reached Hinman Boxes on Monday afternoon, explained the policy by hitting all the right notes. Seniors, "active olders" and Thayer B.E. students are certainly better equipped to choose off-campus real estate, and there is no doubt that the quality of the first-year experience and the Dartmouth Plan-related stresses of finding housing sophomore and junior year trump upperclassmen desires to have nice rooms on campus.
There are, however, gaping holes in the administrative groundwork behind ORL's announcement. First and foremost, the news reached students extremely late. Yes, seniors are "best equipped to find appropriate housing" but not without the appropriate advance notice. While more than six months remain before the beginning of Fall term, any Dartmouth student knows that the leases for premium Hanover real estate are signed and secured almost a year in advance. Furthermore, given the crunch of Winter term, this information would have been much more manageable towards the beginning of the term instead of in the weeks before finals and spring break. What kept Redman from releasing this information to campus earlier in the term?
Another consideration ORL appears to have misjudged is the cost of off-campus housing -- namely desirable housing within a reasonable distance from campus. Despite the results of ORL's seemingly superficial research, off-campus living is not necessarily cheaper than College housing by any means. Living off campus also comes with a bevy of other burdens and fees, which are further complicated when you consider the distance that some students might have to live away from campus.
At the end of the day, the magnitude of this problem is negligible; the impact of the room draw cap will probably be limited to about 100 students and maybe less once the wait list shakes out, and surely the Dartmouth students who get squeezed out of College housing will be able to navigate the off-campus housing market. But with the College continuing to shuffle and recast the residential experience, ORL's most recent announcement shows a worrisome disconnect with the off-campus residential experience. Maybe the larger problem is that Redman's ORL does not consider off-campus housing to be part of its purview.
