On the first floors of residence halls across campus, you can see the names of past intramural champions displayed from days when residence halls fielded teams who casually excelled at everything from water polo to basketball. After living in East Wheelock, I can say that its basketball dynasty died before I arrived on campus in the fall of 2007. No dorm that I'm aware of fields an IM team, and those boards are insignificant to current students. Their irrelevance is a symptom of a very relevant problem at Dartmouth. For many students, residential community and programming is dead. Reviving it must be a priority for the Office of Residential Life.
Over the course of my three years here, I've lived in the East Wheelock cluster, worked as an Undergraduate Advisor on a freshman floor and lived in my fraternity. I don't have any data sets, but I have direct experience that most students understand. Different residential communities at Dartmouth have strengths and weaknesses, but some broad trends exist. First, the quality of a residential community is not tied to the room's square footage or the hall's plush features. Secondly, community is built upon continuity.
I would define good residential community as the phenomenon in which where you live "means something" to you. It is a place of academic, social and personal investment and reward. Many people first experience it as a freshman, whether in the River or McLaughlin or elsewhere. The quality of that residential experience is determined by the people you live with. People in the least luxurious of living arrangements (Hi Choates!) report immense satisfaction with their community, just as the spacious common rooms of East Wheelock's suites sometimes turn lonesome. In my fraternity, I lived in a room specially designed for a pair of diminutive, ascetic monks with a religious aversion to space. I loved every second of it, and I can promise you that a strong residential community is far more important than square footage.
People-centered residential community is contingent upon continuity. My freshman floor grew incredibly close by the end of our first year in Hanover, but now we rarely interact. While one could view this as the consequence of new activities and new priorities, it is important to note the combination of Dartmouth's D-Plan and room draw. I took an informal poll of my fraternity to see how many different ORL residence halls they have lived in since freshman year. The average was more than one per year, a consequence of annual room draw "upgrades" and the splintering of the D-Plan. The result is a dreadful community turnover rate that helps explain why most upperclass students might talk to their UGA once a term, hardly know who lives on their floors and look elsewhere for a stable community (does Greek life ring a bell?). Dorm rooms become mobile storage units, and what could be vibrant residence halls are instead lifeless.
Bearing this in mind, I believe that much of the basis for ORL's housing policy is foolish. The process of room draw is not only an immense tax on psychological and administrative resources, it is also a system designed not for strong communities but for random, and admittedly fair, ones. While strong communities thrive on connectivity and continuity, room draw instead incentivizes a disconnected feeding frenzy of the "best" rooms on campus. Better rooms prove to have little consequence to the quality of community. Sure, it is "fair" to those who had to suffer a double in the Fayers so they could potentially have the opportunity to move into a palatial suite in Fahey. Unfortunately, "fairness" hasn't gotten us very far.
I propose a different system that would still meet the demands of this campus. First, make people move less to foster residential continuity. Second, eliminate randomized seniority as the metric for housing preference. Imagine the possibilities of a merit-based system, where students who invest in their residential communities by planning and programming (or simply attending) cultural, entertainment or intramural athletic events are rewarded with accrued placement priority. Instead of paying UGA's and community directors to host a movie night, we could create a culture of broad-based leadership development within our halls.
Residential halls present an unparalleled opportunity to nurture Dartmouth's fabled "out of the classroom" education. ORL must take the lead and engage students in reviving residential communities at Dartmouth.
