Mon 22 Mar 2004
Mike Needham’s op-ed piece on campus community referenced house pictures.
When I look at the house portraits hanging in Greylock, I don’t just see people who lived together for a year, but rather people who shared an experience with each other that we do not share any longer.
I am not sure if this portrait still hangs in Carter House, but it did 15 years ago.
Highlights in this picture include potential 15th year reunion folks Gillian Lad, David Nadelman, David Bentley, Mary Ilif and Kirsten Hasenfus (now productively married to the fellow next to her).
Before Aidan makes too much fun of my own appearence, I should point at that the WW II fighter pilot look was the idea of Mark Solan, who has since gone on to win an Emmy.
Creativity in college should be encouraged, not mocked.
Since this picture reveals me to be a CC member, I won’t be applying to work for Oren Cass ‘05 anytime soon.
March 23rd, 2004 at 6:14 am
The picture hung at least as late as 1996. We thought the guys in flight suits were hilarious.
Why all the whining about the lottery system? My freshman year was the year they shifted away from the affiliation system. The rationale at the time was that the system was unnecssarily restrictive and unfair. If you got assigned to a lame group like Mission or Greylock, you had a hard time trading out to an area you liked. It inherently favored people who were well liked and well-connected. The market for housing in the affiliation system was best characterized by large information asymmetries and inefficiencies. A few enterprising individuals popped up to serve as market makers and facilitate trades, but why not make people free to live where they want to and do it as fairly as possible (i.e., a lottery verses arm-twisting and social networks).
Sure, the snow sculptures suffered as a result. My freshman year almost every house had a very elaborate snow sculpture. By my senior year, very few houses even had the most rudimentary snow sculptures [Note: Talking to long-time Berkshire residents, I learned that people used to drive from miles around to see the sculptures in the 60s and 70s.] So, yes, Mike is right that cohesiveness has suffered as a result of the housing lottery, but it is much akin to the hand wringing about the upward mobility in immigrant groups — “Little Italies” across the Eastern seaboard lost their distinctiveness after Italians gained the economic and social ability to move into other neighborhoods.
Why should house pictures and snow sculptures lock people into a dorm made of cinderblocks for three years?