"It is highly significant that satisfaction with NGB programming does not translate into neighborhood desirability. Housing trumps all else, and it is conclusive that the neighborhoods are not equal in what they offer. It is also folly to renovate with the specific idea of improving neighborhood equality, as this implies an opportunity cost of not making the most needed renovations overall.
Having visited the campus of Rice and read about similar housing situations, I now understand much better what the 2005 CUL was trying to achieve with the Williams "House System." Residential colleges are a staple at Rice; my brother's first-year orientation was essentially an indoctrination to Brown College (Motto: We're the ____ ), and he loves his college, its faculty master, and his fellow residents, who live and eat together in the Brown Commons. Williams does not possess the needed physical plant to facilitate this sort of system, and building such a plant has a prohibitive cost, at least in the short and mid-term view.
The statements by minorities are incredibly important. Even as someone who went to a 50/50 black/white high school, with plenty of cross-racial interaction, I've yet to really meet or talk with the two black women who live tow floors below me. I've only had meaningful interactions with the people in my suite, one of whom has said somethings that might have made a person of color uncomfortable. While we don't want a return to theme housing, there may be an incentive to make it such that people of different clusters can live in proximity without taking over a house.
Thus, I submit a compromise suggestion for the committee's consideration. In this compromise, 4 groups of housing remain, but each one consists of a roughly equal portion of the Williams Housing Pie. I took the dorms and split them up into 6 clusters - the Greylock Quad, the Berkshire Quad, the far houses, the Row Houses, the most central houses, and houses of some quality very near a dining hall. I have also split Morgan and Prospect into two halves.
The undesirability of Lehman compared to Morgan or West has led me to stipulate that Spencer must be including in the Lehman group, but otherwise, dorms in the below set-up can be switched around for whatever numerical mix desired without making neighborhoods unequal. In addition, this allows for a 50% expansion in the number of co-op beds, though this number can be raised or lowered by moving the Dodd Row Houses in and out of co-op status.
What does this mean?
Teams and groups will not be able to take over one house, because they are still split between clusters. However, clusters of houses could attain "party status," such as the Row Houses and and Far Houses. This allows for students interested in that sort of thing to pick into those houses such that we have limited segregation by interest, but without making any particular house attain a definite status or dominance. It means that social groups can arrange to live on the same quad (if they give up better housing options), but that interactions with their house can still remain free.
This is a compromise, and will not solve many of the problems that students have with residential life, but it does not exacerbate those problems, will probably reduce some of them, and will eliminate housing inequality.
Summary of Compromise:
Pluses -
- Eliminates extreme isolation that some students feel by allowing students of different clusters to live near each other.
- Allows all students to live near where they have many classes/activities
- Berkshire Quad for Griffin,
- Greylock for Theatre/Dance kids, who have been known to sleep in the '62 Center).
- Eliminates neighborhood inequality
- Up to 50% increase in highly desired Co-Op housing
- Allows for limited themes, hopefully such that all students have a quieter living option.
- Maintains NGBs and CC Representation.
- Maintains current event planning, which is becoming more successful.
- Keeps student groups split, avoiding explicitly themed houses.
- Low administrative costs of switching, can be done through current lottery process.
- Housing groups still not completely equal as compared to free-agency.
- Students may have to choose between a better room and a "theme they disagree with"
- It could be difficult for students to coordinate picks in the same housing cluster.
- Students still don't have free choice in housing.
- Does not seek to solve many intrinsic issues the Neighborhood system sought to fix. (might be a plus?)
- Eliminates group/neighborhood housing in the same area of campus
Cluster
| Greylock | 89 | Gladden | 76 | M.Hopkins | 70 | Carter | 62 | Bryant | |
| Berkshire | 54 | East | 60 | Fay | 63 | Currier | 44 | Fitch | |
| Far, far away | 34 | Tyler | 40 | T. Annex | 30 | Agard | 41 | Garfield | |
| Near food | 50 | Dodd | 28 | Thompson | 52 | Prospect1 | 52 | Prospect2 | |
| Row Houses | 25 | Spencer | 28 | Brooks | 28 | Perry | 30 | Wood | |
| Cream | 32 | Lehman | 53 | Morgan 1 | 52 | Morgan2 | 54 | West | |
| Total | 284 | 285 | 295 | 283 |
| New Co-ops Goodrich -11 |
| Hubbell - 21 |
| Parsons - 9 |
| Sewall - 11 |
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