Tue 15 Feb 2005
Kudos to the Record for concluding that cluster housing should not be implemented this year.
The co-op draw for the Class of 2006 is now behind us, and it hardly seems fair to have asked students to make important decisions about the co-op draw without knowing what the regular room draw would entail. We remain convinced that the CUL’s proposal will be a good one for Williams, but we hope that the CUL will resist heeding a pressure that need not exist to implement cluster housing before the proposal has matured.
Surely all Ephs of goodwill can conclude that the most important change at Williams in the last decade deserves more than a few weeks of discussion after CUL submits its proposal.
I hope, however, that the Record is wrong to claim that “CUL chairman Will Dudley has stated his desire to avoid going through another year of anchor housing debate next year.” There is no way that the Will Dudley that I knew 20 years ago would say that. Debate is a good thing! Thinking hard about difficult issues is a feature, not a bug, of the disagreement over what Williams should be.
Williams would be a better college if there were a debate of this magnitude every year. Alas, that is tough to arrange, but there is still no reason to cut this one short.
UPDATE: An occasional reader claims that I presented the Record’s editorial inaccurately. Well, the wonder of the web is that you can read for yourself and decide. Like any good blogger, I provided a link and direct quote. The focus of the editorial is certainly mainly on other topics, but, as I read it, the Record does not think that anchor housing should be implemented in 6 weeks. I agree.
February 15th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
The most important change at Williams in the last decade?
Hardly. The most important was getting rid of Hank Payne. Cluster housing won’t change the college in any dramatic fashion. Housing is the most overblown issue at the college. Is there ever a more embarassing display of anxiety by 19 year olds at an elite school than when the housing draw reaches the end for the to-be sophomores?
The social scene has stayed pretty much the same, with most of its declines due to changes in security policies over the past 8 or 9 years. It’s just too big of a hassle to put on a party.
The college had upper classmen in the same dorm for all of their years at Williams long ago, and it never hurt anyone.
It’s certainly a silly proposal, but far from the end of the world. Housing is just not that important in the end, especially if you get a few close friends in your group, which this policy still allows.
February 16th, 2005 at 12:54 am
This week’s record had a timeline of Williams housing changes which is not online. Not all aspects of the timeline match things that alums have been discussing on EphBlog. I’d be interested in having alums from the past five to forty years comment on the timeline’s accuracy. Perhaps EphBlog could assemble a timeline of its own through a collective effort?
February 16th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
The Record has now posted additional articles from this week’s issue online. The crucial ones:
A History of Housing at Williams
An interview with faculty alums
Is the timeline according to the Record accurate? What do alums who read EphBlog think about the timeline and about the housing sentiments expressed in the interview?
February 16th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
The timeline seems accurate enough to me. What are the discepancies between it and what you have read here? Major breakdowns involving trading had not occured by 1987 but I can see how they developped shortly thereafter. My senior year roommate traded into Carter from Mission, but it was quite uncommon up to that point.
I can’t comment on housing in the 1990’s, but the alumni comments are consistent with what I have read elsewhere.
It is very hard to separate two issues: housing policy and alcohol policy. I think that, too often, people attribute perceieved declines in social life to changes in housing policy when the primary culprit is alcohol polciy — over which the College is largely at the whim of the Williamstown Police Department.
February 16th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Looking at the Record timeline, the real question to me seems to be: what happened between 1996 and 2002? It seems pretty clear that there were issues and tensions that needed to be — and, seemingly, ultimately were — resolved in earlier time periods with the phasing out of fraternities (in response to their impact on college life and the coming of co-education), institution of cluster housing (in response to the elination of fraternities), and their eventual elimination once they became ineffective (in response to greater extracurricular rather than house affiliation) — though perhaps with 30, 20, or 15 years, it is easier to see what happened than in the last five to 10 years.
So what was it in the past decade that caused the CUL to propose a return to cluster housing? As David brought up, alcohol seems to be most likely the impetus. I would specultate that the change in the party policy — which happened, I think, in the late ’90s — and the ensuing changes in the social and drinking culture of the College during the early ’00s, seem to be the most likely candidate as to the cause of the CUL’s proposal.
Whether or not neo-cluster housing is something that will be effective or not is another issue — one that everyone seems to be weighing in on quite actively without needing me to comment, too. :) But it would be nice to know the CUL’s thinking about why they believe change is necessary in concrete and historical terms. This act of transparency, I think, that would do much for students more readily accepting — or at the least more positively and effectively critiquing — the proposal.
February 16th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Well, two items that immediately come to mind are 1) that the timeline puts the age of the Odd Quad at approximately 20 years, while your EphBlog posts have asserted that it’s more like 50 years old, and 2) that the switch to free agency around 1993 is presented as a major change, but that I’ve come to understand that the house affiliation system had degraded into effective free agency, making the official change simply a name change–i.e., housing patterns for most students/classes didn’t change much after 1993. Am I wrong on one or both of these points?
February 16th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Just to clarify: I re-read my post, and I forgot to include an important statement, which, without it, makes me look kind of stupid. Yes, I’ve read the CUL proposal and the associated Record articles and heard the CUL’s reasons for neo-cluster housing; it’s just that I think there must be something underlying their declared reasons because, on their own, they just don’t seem to add up to enough to warrant such a major change. But if there were underlying concerns about alcohol, its abuse by students because of a lack of affiliation to something larger, and its negative effect on college life, that would be something quite significant — and, I would warrant, cause students to look at this proposal a little differently than just imposed from above social engineering for the sake of reviving traditions and school pride.
Sorry to double post.
February 16th, 2005 at 3:46 pm
AED,
By all accounts that I have read, the driving force was the arrival of virtual theme housing around the year 2000. Here is a portion of a longer e-mail from a student of that era:
The College — either as an institution or as specific individuals (note that Schapiro and Roseman both started in 200) — decided that they did not like segregation. They did not like all the residents of Tyler Annex being helmut sporters. They did not like one of the Dodd houses (I forget which one) being 100% African American.
I personally agree with this, to some extent.
I believe that that is the “meta” story of how Williams went from the wide-open system of 1998 to the eve of anchor housing.
The College does not care if friends live with friends. The College does not want “theme” housing and will do whatever is necessary to stop it.
February 16th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
Amarnath,
1) The age of the Odd Quad is much greater than 20 years. By 1984, it was an institution. I believe that the term “Odd Quad” is at least that old. I also believe that, in most senses, it goes back 50 years or more. Back in the days before Mission and Greylock, the majority of students that were not in fraternities lived in the Berkshire Quad.
I think that there is a direct social/cultural connection between the sort of student who choose not to live in a fraternity (and/or was denied admission) and the sort of student who lived in the Odd Quad in the 1980’s. I believe that that connection continues to the present day.
2) I think that it depends on what you mean by “effective” free agency. By all accounts (see also the Record article you linked to) the system was a total pain and subject to all sorts of corruption. I would be curious to know, for example, what percentage of Mission was seniors. I think that, even during the early 1990’s, it was substantial.
So, there was plenty of trading going on, but I do not think that Mission as a dorm that is more than, say, 70% sophomore started until the late 1990’s. So, I do not think that free agency itself can be considered to be more than 10 years old, if that. But, again, I wasn’t there.
February 16th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
I was a sophomore the year we switched from housing affiliations to a campus-wide draw (the first draw was for my rising junior year).
Under the “old” system, picks were stratified by house cluster (some row houses and the Dodd complex were tied together) and by class year. So, my pick for 1993-94 (my sophomore year) was a sophomore pick in Perry/Bascom/Chadbourne. That was a sorry pick. If I’d kept it, I’d have been able to participate in room draw in P/B/C, where I’d have one of the last picks (pick order was randomly assigned, but all seniors picked before all juniors, etc), so I’d have gotten a double, which is a fate worse than death.
Instead, my roommate and I traded picks with 2 juniors who had picks in Mills. If I recall correctly, they were able to join with seniors in P/B/C and get a decent room draw as a group (better than my group would have gotten as lowly sophomores), while we got junior picks in Mills.
The ridiculousness of this system should be apparent by now: seniors who nominally belonged to Mission almost NEVER picked there, except for a few rowdy guys who wanted to live in Thompson, while sophomores who nominally belonged to row houses never had any realistic opportunity to get decent rooms in those houses and traded their picks away.
So, the Record timeline is correct when it says that the campus-wide room draw was (almost) universally hailed as a success.
If the housing cluster system is going to work, they’re going to have to convince juniors to live in Mission. The last housing affiliation system was an utter failure in this regard: Mission had become 90% sophomores by 1993. Personally, I kind of liked living in Mission, but it seems to be a tough sell to most folks.
February 16th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
There is a great story to be written here about how the housing system evolved from 1987 to 1993 without any charges, I think, in the formal rules. If I were Mark Taylor, I would talk about “emergence” whereby the individual decisions made by students gave rise to new macro structures.
But I am not Mark Taylor.
Back in 1987, freshmen student groups had to select among 5 clusters (sound familar?) They were Mission, Greylock, Dodd/Tyler, Berkshire and all the Row Houses as a group. You listed your preferences by cluster. My three person group put Greylock first. We got it and were randomly assigned to Carter.
Other groups put Dodd or the Row Houses or the Berkshire Quad first. Different people had different priorities. I did not know of a single group that put Mission first.
So, I think, that it was very hard for a senior with a Mission affiliation to trade out of it. Any sophomore who wanted to live in Mission could have just by selecting it.
But it sounds like things changed around 1990. Perhaps there was even a tipping point where the more sophomores that lived in Mission, the more desirable it became for other sophomores to join them. From there it is easy to see how mutually beneficial trading could quickly turn Mission into 90% sophomores.
Describing this process — including looking at the old data and interviewing students who were there — would make for a great thesis.
February 16th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
David,
Good points. As someone who as a freshman/sophomore during 2000, I can definitely attest to the accuracy of the description of the three-part split (partier/non-partier; athlete/non-athlete; class year) that generally definited one’s social and housing choices.
However, wasn’t it sort of always like this? Under fraternities (which were definitely theme housing), as well as under cluster housing (whereby houses seem to have virtually become theme housing after the corrupt scheme of 15-way trades and opt-outs to reaffiliate took place allowed people to out-fox the system and live where they wanted to — the fact that the Odd Quad solidified its identity during this time period seems to evidence this under-the-table theme housing). The free agent system makes transparent the students’ de facto establishment of quasi-theme housing through their picks (although I would mention, there was measurably more diversity within houses before the decrease in pick size from seven to four people). I doubt a reinstatement of cluster housing (which students were able to manipulate before) will do little to prevent students from finding ways to continue living with people of more or less similar interests. Indeed, it might just create the current housing situation in the microcasm of the cluster.
Furthermore, (as much as I hate to be the cynical person that propses this) the warm fuzzies of traditions and house affiliation that cluster house residents remember may not be a result of the anchor house system per se. If you look historically, this was the follow-up system to the fraternities, a housing system that was loaded with traditions, rituals, and inter-house competitions. The memories that people have of the affilition, traditions, and nostalgia of cluster housing, I would wager, are more of the effect of remnants of the fraternity ambience creating a confounding variable that obscures the effectiveness of clusters as a housing system.
Indeed, I would wager that the remnants of the fraternity structure, for a time, were just transfered over to the clusters, likely through the upperclassmen who were a part of or remembered the fraternity days. I would speculate that it was once those people graduated and the influence of the remenants of the fraternity system decreased to nothing as fewer and ultimately none of its traditions and ambience were passed on to the new students (which would be, say, the late 1980s-early 1990s, right before the free agent system was instituted) that the cluster system became less effective and began to fail as students became to feel less, and ultimately, none of an affiliation with their houses.
I know this is coming off very anti-cluster housing (which I’m not against in the abstract; it’s just that it seems that there are a number of problems with it in the concrete in instituting it at 2,000-student Williams College in rural Williamstown, Mass.), but I think it’s important to look at housing — like the Record did in its timeline — as part of the longue duree of institutional history. And, as I suggested above, I think that correlating the shifts in housing with other College cultural, curricular, etc. changes might be a better way to study the benefits/problems of these housing systems, including the current one (granted I might be pushing the idea of links between the Oct. 1997 Agard incident’s instigation of the change in party policy (which I think has clearly changed the social scene of Williams through the 1999-2001 entry walkthroughs, soaring health center and alcohol poisining hospital visits, elination of BYOB to Homecoming, etc.) and the decision to overhaul housing a bit too far, but I think the process of looking for less obvious causalities is a good one) to find and to explain to the Williams students a better system of housing.
Sorry this post is so long — I guess, despite my alumnus status, I’m still quite invested and interested in these issues.
February 16th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
Feel free to correct me, but by the time I was at Williams, the fraternity system had been (publicly) extinct for over 20 years. I would be very surprised if any traditions which existed in the existing housing clusters at that time came from the fraternity system. Although my experience may have been unusual (having lived fot three years on the 4th floor of Bryant House), I did have a certain loyalty/fondness for the house, which transcended the particular individuals who lived there. I think this was a positive experience. I met and became friends with persons whom I probably never would have known otherwise, both in my class and other classes. I think that, conceptually, some form of the Anchor Housing system would be positive. Of course, the devil is always in the details. My view would be to divorce the coops and the freshman entries from the clusters, and not worry about whether the JA’s have particular cluster affiliations.