Residential Life and Death
By Isaiah Berg, Staff Columnist
Published on Monday, January 4, 2010
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.
I read with great interest today’s (¼/2010) Opinion regarding the utter lack of a ”sense of community” in dormitory halls and clusters courtesy of the D-Plan and the housing assignment system.
As the last President of the Inter-Dormitory Council (which merged with another body to create the current student government association) in 1984, I and others were left with the task of dismantling a system which had existed for many decades in favor of the “new” Residential Cluster system advocated by the College as a social counter-balance to the fraternity/sorority system. Among other things, each Dormitory — not “Cluster”, as that term had little meaning at the time except as a negative connotation for the River Cluster — had a “Dorm Chair” who wielded considerable influence with respect to housing assignments, such that the Dorm Chair actually submitted proposed assignments to the “housing office”, and priority was always given to current residents, followed by the ability of a current resident to “pull in” a friend. In this context, the room draw numerical assignments existed first to establish priority within a dorm, and second to establish priority for those who sought to move to new dorms. The seniority system Mr. Berg proposed actually existed to some degree, as Dorm Chairs and Social Events Coordinators were automatically guaranteed the pick of the “best” rooms within their current dorms. As a 3 year South Fayer resident, I can assure you that many felt an allegiance to their fellow residents, and even shared a great desire to “win” certain intramural events and spend (not always wisely) the per capita social events allowance provided by the College.
Mr. Berg’s column appears to confirm the very fears we had 26 years ago – that any system which dissolved smaller cohesive units in favor of larger and more fragmented ones was doomed to “fail” in its stated purpose of fostering a greater sense of community. Under the axiom that “all politics is local”, perhaps the College ought to reconsider its approach and recognize that many (most) friendships are “local”, as well. For my class and those around us, “transient” meant moving to a fraternity house or to an off-campus apartment, not to another residence hall. I note that a component of our 25th Reunion effort this past June centered on recruiting participation based on dormitory as well as fraternity/sorority, club and sports affiliations.
It is no surprise that electronic assignments devoid of student input have dramatically changed the residential experience, arguably for the worse. While it was and will always remain important to experience new friends and new surroundings, that does not imply that one must physically move each year to do so. Mr. Berg nailed it when he correctly noted that “the quality of that residential experience is determined by the people you live with”; of course, that requires that you know who they are !
W. Kyle Gore ‘84
By W. Kyle Gore 84 on Jan 4 | 12:07 pm
On that note, Mr. Gore, I’m curious as to why that old system was dismantled those years ago. Was it precipitated by a lack of on-campus housing to meet student demand? Or was it purely a social initiative as you describe to counter-balance the fraternity/sorority system?
The reason I am curious, is that I can think of few other structural features of the College that push more students into the Greek system than the Office of Residential Life. If the College’s goal was to provide a viable alternative to a (then dominant as now?) Greek system, the worst thing they could was to empty the dorms of their small, tight-knit communities.
By Isaiah J. Berg on Jan 4 | 7:46 pm
The move to a Cluster (vs. Dormitory) based system was primarily based on “social programming” considerations i.e. fraternity/sorority counterbalance was definitely a major driver. While a shortage of on-campus housing was and remains a major consideration, arguably that is neither ameliorated nor exacerbated by a residential cluster system. I believe that the D had more than one article on the subject at the time (1983-1984 archives ?). I also recall that the ORL actually was created as part of this initiative; previously, it was known as the Housing Office, with social events coordinated and funds accessed separately by student groups and dormitories, which submitted proposals to a committee of students and administrators (obviously have no clue as to how that’s done now).
By W. Kyle Gore 84 on Jan 4 | 10:12 pm