Upon receiving the March 21 email from Board of Trustees chair Steve Mandel ’78 announcing Dartmouth’s upcoming transition to a “house system,” I first thought, “What does that mean?” After living on a close-knit freshman floor (shout-out to my Bissell 2 friends), I was shocked at the lack of “community” on my floor in Smith Hall sophomore year. I saw the dismally low attendance at our floor meeting last fall and realized it would be necessary for me to embrace my naturally distant demeanor, even in the comfort of my own home.
Administrators have discussed a new residential education system for upperclassmen for the past three years, senior associate dean of the college Inge-Lise Ameer said. Last year, members of the administration traveled with a group of students to look at residential college and house systems at other schools around the U.S., she said.
In the fall, the College will introduce pilot “living-learning communities.” The College is currently selecting an outside firm to assess how the College should roll out the house system, she said.
Residential education director Mike Wooten said that these new residential plans are part of the College’s continual effort to make sure its initiatives are in line with the College’s liberal arts mission.
He emphasized that residential communities on campus should be more “porous.”
“We have to get out of the siloing of components of campus,” Wooten said. “We need to reimagine our residential space as being very much related to the mission of the College, and if not, we’re spending too much money on it.”
While they’ve looked at housing at a variety of larger schools, including Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University, administrators have not looked at smaller schools with residential systems.
Ameer, who was formerly the interim director of advising programs at Harvard, explained that the housing systems at Yale University and Harvard are well-established and cannot be duplicated at Dartmouth, where students constantly go on- and off-campus.
“We’re not Yale and Harvard, so we want to make this work for Dartmouth students,” she said. “We want to make this work with the D-Plan.”
The dean’s office and other administrators have collected more than 10 years of data on residential colleges, Wooten said. This information indicates that students tend to flourish most in residential systems with communities that have programs, pedagogy and faculty involvement, he said. Students reporting on their experience in first-year communities and East Wheelock, which incorporates these elements into the cluster, tend to be “healthier,” he said.
Most students report being satisfied with their freshman housing experience and then come into sophomore year feeling lost, Ameer said. Since students do not remain within their first-year cluster, they find themselves lacking any sense of residential community, and UGAs are no longer as invested in the lives of the students on their floor.
This radical change contributes to widespread disillusionment among students by deepening social divisions as students progress in their Dartmouth careers, Jayant Subrahmanyam ’15 said.
Dartmouth’s current upperclassman housing feels “very sterile,” Sophia Johnston ’15 said.
“That sort of translates through so people are in and out,” she said. “If you allow people to decorate or feel that this is the kind of place that they’re going to come every Friday when they finish class to just have a cup of coffee or really hang out with friends, I think that could be a solution.”
With the new model, students will travel with their first-year cluster to another neighborhood, where they will have the option to live — and return to after off-terms — for the rest of their time at Dartmouth.
While the idea of the new housing system has been well-received by many students, the absence of a detailed plan makes it difficult to assess the impact the initiative will have on student life.
Several students I spoke with voiced concern over the great disparity in the conditions of different dorm clusters across campus.
“I’m apprehensive that in a rush to tout residential housing as a sexy answer to the much-maligned Greek system, the administration may neglect to update the infrastructure of our dorms to the level they need to ensure equity,” Sahil Seekond ’15 said.
Though some may speculate that a push for a residential housing system is a ploy to undermine the Greek system on campus, Wooten said this is not the case. Because people are scattered around campus throughout their time at the College, it makes sense that people would seek out community in a Greek house, Wooten said. The residential life system actually has much to learn from Greek life on campus in terms of serving as a place to come back to after a term abroad or while living in an affinity house or off campus, he said.
Given the higher drinking age and stricter laws, dorms at Dartmouth cannot host parties like they did a few decades ago.
While the average Dartmouth student would probably enjoy dorm parties, there is some value in having dry, intellectual social spaces.
After finding out she had a low housing lottery number at the end of her freshman year, Aileen Zhu ’16 moved into a one-room double in East Wheelock with her freshman year roommate.
“I feel like comparing East Wheelock to my freshman housing would be like comparing apples to oranges,” Zhu said. “No matter where I would have lived this year, upperclassmen treat housing assignments differently.”
Quietness is an underrated factor when considering housing, she said. Zhu prefers living in a relatively calm dorm rather than the Fayerweather clusters, which she called a fun social space at night but not ideal for finding peace and quiet.
Zhu is a member of The Dartmouth staff.
Melina Turk ’14, who lives in an on-campus apartment, has found it impossible to find a residential community since freshman year.
“I still am good friends with a lot of my freshman floormates and feel that after freshman year, there wasn’t really a sense of community in dorms,” she said. “It wasn’t really a place where I could make meaningful relationships.”
Though residential colleges may offer alternative social spaces to the Greek system, Beta Alpha Omega fraternity president Chet Brown ’15 said the Greek system is not under direct threat.
“I see the housing system coexisting with Greek life as another social outlet,” Brown said. “I don’t know what the administration’s goals are beyond providing some continuity of housing for students, but I don’t think the two systems will be very exclusive from one another.”
Others believe the change may alleviate some of Dartmouth’s social problems. Aside from encouraging all sororities to go local, the neighborhoods system is the most viable plan for solving many of the issues created by the Greek system without completely overhauling it, Subrahmanyam said.
“I’d like to see some well-thought-out initiatives like the return of a functional inter-dorm athletic league,” Seekond said.
Many top-tier colleges across the country have adopted versions of a residential housing system.
At Princeton University, students are required to live within a residential college for at least their first two years and may continue to do so for the second half of their college careers.
Cameron Maple, a Princeton junior, said he opted to live in a residential college over an upperclassman dorm because of its amenities.
“They generally have nicer rooms, air conditioning, their own cafeteria, staff, a college office, libraries and study spaces and special events,” Maple said.
Johnston, whose brother is a sophomore at Princeton, said she thinks Dartmouth’s proposed new housing system would be a step in the right direction for undergraduate life, though Dartmouth’s house system likely would not provide all the comforts offered at Princeton.
“I think there is much more monitoring of the individual, and people don’t get lost and fall between the cracks or feel like they’re kind of meaningless,” Johnston said. “Here you have your dean and your academic advisor, but apart from that there isn’t that similar support network within a residential community.”
At Rice University, more than 3,700 undergraduates are divided into 11 residential colleges for three years of their stay. Due to limited available housing, most students must live one year off campus, though they often still live with members of their residential college. Sanjana Puri, a sophomore at Rice, said she is living off campus next year with her current suitemates from her residential college. Though residential colleges provide strong communities, students also can expand outside of the residential college system through extracurriculars and clubs, Puri said.
“The residential college is a very integral part of the Rice community because our colleges are where we eat, live,” Puri said. “A lot of the times most of the people we hang out with are in our colleges.”
Each residential college has its own traditions, and an element of competition exists among the houses, she said. One famous tradition is the annual Beer Bike, a bike race and drinking competition held every May since 1957, when the residential college system was introduced.
Other schools have found their own paths, too. All freshmen at Vanderbilt live in first-year residential and learning communities, each led by a faculty member, and all undergraduate students must live on campus. Residence hall communities at the University of Michigan host concerts, movie screenings and socials, and all have live-in staff. At Harvard, upperclassmen are placed into one of 12 houses, each with unique traditions and a senior faculty advisor after freshman year. Yale has 12 residential colleges, and undergraduate students remain affiliated with their freshmen residence all four years.
The College’s proposed system has the potential to transform our campus’s living experience. Amid the uncertainty of the new housing initiative, one thing will hopefully always be true: No matter where you find yourself in residential housing, EBAs is just a phone call away.
