Mold, broken showerheads, flooded toilets, dysfunctional laundry machines, rattling heaters. These are just a few staple rite-of-passage characteristics you’ll find in Dartmouth’s first-year housing, all for the low, low price of $12,579.
Life in the River and Choates cluster dorms is notoriously grim, leaving students with just one thing to look forward to: the great escape to sophomore housing. With its elevators and daily sushi, its balconies and campus centrality, upperclassman housing turns former housing-renovation-advocates into apathists. Dartmouth has a severe housing disparity that is affecting students in punishing ways. The College knows this, yet they will continue to do nothing so long as our ‘rite-of-passage’ attitude prevails.
In a statement to The Dartmouth two years ago, undergraduate housing director Rachel Class-Giguere explained that the Choates and River clusters have been used as first-year housing for more than 20 years “because their design encourages a strong sense of community.” If by “design” she means broken laundry machines and spouting toilets, she’s right. The fact that you’ll often hear first-years call living in these dorms “trauma-bonding” should force the College to reconsider its definition of “community.”
Behind every “Oh, you’re in the River dorms? That’s the worst!” hides a bequested “I’ve got mine” from every upperclassman you speak to about housing. In no way do I want to attack upperclassmen for this attitude — I fully expect to enjoy the height of my horse the second my showers are hot. But I do want our campus to recognize that our apathy towards housing disparity is imposed on us by the College in strategic ways we don’t realize.
First-years arrive on campus with tails tucked between their legs and hearts thumping faster than their oncoming midterms. Whether or not their toilet flushes automatically becomes a shrug — maybe a brave phone call to maintenance. Not only that, but by the time first-years find their place on campus and muster the courage to speak up about the mold growing behind their microwaves, they’re nearly sophomores and might as well hold out for a few more months.
The few first-years who choose to act are met with administrative bureaucracy and reminders from upperclassmen that this is simply “how it goes.” Avenues like student government don’t accomplish much either. After all, three-fourths of senators are upperclassmen who (understandably) don’t especially care or, if they do, aren’t willing to dedicate hours of administrative work to help out some first-years who can’t vote to re-elect them.
Pulling only from anecdata — as the school would never dare to poll students on whether they attribute their illnesses to their living situations — a lot of people are getting sick. Friends of mine have contracted pneumonia multiple times, and they blame the spores of mold staring back at them in the shower. That level of illness forces students to skip class and miss out on extracurriculars. When it comes to their health, the students living in the River and Choates are paying the price.
They’re also literally paying the price. For $12,579, Choates residents have to walk up stairs to pee in a different flooded bathroom than the flooded bathroom they shower in, while East Wheelock residents have the news displayed on screens in their elevators.
This sounds like a lot of complaining, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have anything to do with my laundry experience this week, but my concern is that next year I won’t complain, and neither will anyone else, and the College will yet again go another year without taking any accountability for the terrible living conditions they charge a fortune for.
One potential solution I’ve debated with friends is to adjust the price of housing according to geographic convenience and residential quality. In this model, students in the River and Choates clusters would pay less, while students in the more desirable Fayerweather and Massachusetts Halls would pay more. The main issue that emerges, however, is that lower-income students would likely opt for the cheaper housing, with higher-income students selecting the nicer, producing centrifugal rings of income separation and inequality on campus.
The only solution that remains, in my eyes, is to fix first-year housing. Renovate, burn, rebuild, whatever, but something must be done. Dartmouth administration: Students deserve better, especially given how much they pay and how fat Beilock’s wallet is. Want student mental health to improve? Fix our heaters so we can get a good night’s sleep instead of raising $16 million for an AI therapy bot. To the current and soon-to-be upperclassmen, remember your rough experience and encourage incoming first-years to speak up about their concerns. Make it clear to them: Just because the first-year “rite-of-passage” might be “the way it is” does not make it the way it should be.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
