Dartmouth is often slow to pick up on trends The College on the Hill is usually set in its ways, reluctant to pick up on crazy fads such as giving extra class credit for labs, Greek reform and a Board of Trustees that includes people other than MBAs. But one trend that Dartmouth should not miss out on and one for which it can find plenty of successful examples is comprehensive housing reform. This idea has been tossed around on these pages before, most recently by Ethan Wang ("Lessons From Hogwarts," July 15). I would like to expound on this point and offer reasons why all members of the Dartmouth community should embrace this idea, as well as offer what I think is the first concrete plan for such reform.
The goal for which we should aim is housing continuity. This model involves assigning students to a building with which they will be associated and a group of peers with whom they will live throughout their Dartmouth careers Many universities now offer such a system, including the California Institute of Technology, Notre Dame University, Rice University, Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. Vanderbilt University and others are moving toward it. My friends at these schools tell me that the housing system encourages camaraderie and allows students to form relationships with people that they would not otherwise have become friends with through the Greek system or their social interactions. The Dartmouth version would be roughly based on the existing cluster system. Russell Sagians would form lasting bonds with their 220 or so cluster-mates, and New Hampshire Hall versus Massachusetts Row intramural games would be a fixture of the weekend schedule.
The obvious obstacle to the plan is the wide variety of housing offered at Dartmouth. Students assigned to the River cluster for their four years would be understandably upset, while those assigned to Fahey-McLane might be unfairly advantaged. Another problem arises with location: Athletes might not want to give up the opportunity to live in New Hamp or the Lodge, and engineering students would probably want to maintain the option of living in Gold Coast. There are solutions to these two problems, however. The first is to give first years the least desirable housing. Freshmen would still be affiliated with an upperclassmen cluster, but would spend their first year at Dartmouth in all-freshmen dorms. Yale does this, and it would allow the freshmen to get to know each other as a class and create space in the clusters for upperclassmen. To solve the location problem, Dartmouth could allow students to transfer clusters in special circumstances, as most schools offering housing continuity already do.
The plan I am imagining puts freshmen together in the least desirable dorms and splits the upperclassmen into clusters of roughly equal size. Freshmen could all be housed in the River, Choates, Fayerweathers, Topliff, Wheeler, and Ripley-Woodward-Smith. Upperclass clusters would be Mass Row, Gold Coast, Russell Sage-Butterfield-Hitchcock, Fahey-McLane, New Hamp and Zimmerman, East Wheelock (without Zimmerman) and McLaughlin, which would include some apartments and affinity housing. Each cluster would have 205-260 students, roughly the size of the various residential colleges, houses and halls at the universities that currently offer continuity. This is just one option, but it shows that such a system is possible.
The benefits of this arrangement are many. First, it would provide a natural structure for uniting students across classes and social groups. Freshmen would also have a built-in group of upperclassmen to provide advice during the confusion of their first few terms at Dartmouth. A continuous housing system would also be a nice complement to the Greek system cluster councils could organize cluster-wide social events, providing a student-run alternative to the Greek system that doesn't have the forced feel of Collis events but does not compete with other parties.
Housing continuity used to be a reality at Dartmouth and allowed students to "prefer" to live in the same dorm two years in a row. However, if housing continuity is really going to achieve its potential, we must go beyond that and require students to be affiliated with a certain cluster for their time here at Dartmouth. To do so would improve the Dartmouth experience and should be welcomed by students and administrators alike.
