Thu 25 Aug 2005
Any fan of Williams intramurals (IM) should be worried about the effect of anchor housing on this hallowed tradition. In fact, I predict that the institution of anchor housing will lead, almost inevitably, to an intramural scene at Williams that is much less popular and inclusive than the current one, and even worse than what IM sports could be with only some minor improvements. Yet only screed-lovers should read further.
Start with some of the statements in the CUL Report.
The expectation is that affiliation with a meaningful residential community will enable the flourishing of many social activities, generated at the local level, but with campus-wide impacts: . . . greater enthusiasm for intramural sports (with teams representing houses rather than, as is typical under the free agent system, representing varsity sports teams that are “out of season”).
See here, here and here for previous commentary on IM sports. It seems obvious that the system of self-formed teams in intra-mural sports is sub-optimal. Much better is a system in which everyone signs up for, say, soccer, captains are recruited to head the different teams, and the league distributes players to ensure competitive balance. I have made this suggestion to Director of Campus Life Doug Bazuin. He didn’t seem interested.
The House System also offers the opportunity to reinvigorate the intramural competition that once thrived at Williams, and which can serve both to celebrate and reinforce students’ attachment to their residential communities. Such competition can include athletics (from basketball to innertube water polo), but it could also include bridge, chess, debate, public speaking, and many of the other activities that Williams students enjoy. Consideration might even be given to the awarding of an annual House Cup, in the interest of stimulating friendly House rivalry. Houses are encouraged to work creatively with the Office of Campus Life and the Athletic Department to develop intramural traditions that have broad appeal.
This is the CUL at its phantasmagorical best. In what possible universe is it plausible that there might be “public speaking” competitions between Houses? I know that, old alum that I am, I have little insight into kids today, but who would attend such events?
Also, it is nice to see that CUL favors “intramural traditions that have broad appeal,” but — Newsflash! — Williams already has this, or at least it did back in the day. Lots of people played IM Soccer. Is this no longer true? Again, we all wish that the CUL had bothered to collect some data on intramural sports over time. It would have been useful to compare and contrast different ways of organizing IM sports at Williams. But the whole idea that the way that you improve a community is to throw out everything that you have a start afresh from Year 0 is the worst sort of social planning fantasy.
To me, it is obvious that Williams would be better off with individual-sign-up IM sports rather than bring-your-own team. I might be right. I might be wrong. But these are the sort of small, concrete steps that CUL ought to spend its time studying. Instead, we get a wholesale restructuring of residential life at Williams. I hope that it all works out.
Most troubling, however, is President Schapiro’s prescription from the Alumni Review.
Each house will have a governance structure, faculty associates and funds for programming. Intramurals will again be organized by house.
“again”? I am not certain what this means. Although there was some intramural activity organized by house in the 1980’s — I think that broomball was only a house-based competition along with perhaps a few other sports (basketball?) — 95% of actual intramural games had nothing to do with houses. Post-fraternities, has there ever been another system? I don’t think so.
More importantly, is Morty saying that he is going to dismantle the current intramural system, that if you want to play intramural soccer (and you live in the Wood Cluster), you will have no choice but to play on the (one?) Wood team? That doesn’t seem to make much sense since there are many more student within the Wood cluster of 275 who want to play soccer, basketball and so on than can fit on a single team. I guess that you could restrict participation via try-outs or whatever and that this would lead to a higher level of play, but I can’t imagine that anyone favors this. (Then again, I couldn’t imagine the depth of support in the Administration for Anchor Housing itself.)
I guess that Morty might mean that IM Frisbee will still have 10 or so teams — How many does it have now? — but that those teams will be organized by House. That is, if you live in Wood and want to play frisbee, you need to play on one of the 2 or 3 Wood teams. I certainly prefer this option to the only-one-Wood-team choice, but I don’t see it as very stable. Certainly, at places like Harvard and Yale and all (?) the other House-based colleges that CUL loves to idealize, there is only one intramural team per house. Given that there are a dozen or so houses, this seems like a natural outcome, although it does lead to Harvard, for example, having no more IM soccer players than Williams despite being three times the size.
Could Wood House maintain 3 IM frisbee teams? I doubt it. After all, the CUL will be constantly trying to instill House spirit and (friendly) House competition. Let’s all go to the Quidditch Match! Well, to the extent that this works — and it may work a bit — there will be pressure to, you know, win. Wood House, or at least the folks in charge of intramurals at Wood House, will want to win the IM Frisbee Cup. How will they do that? Not by distributing their frisbee volunteers randomly among their three teams, much less by ensuring that the three teams are equal in talent. The way to win the IM Frisbee Cup will be, you guessed it, to put all your best players on one of the three teams.
Other houses will, presumably, want to do the same. Once a single house does it, others will be left with few options. After all, House spirit will be running strong! Then, how many people will want to keep on playing on the 2nd tier teams, teams that have no change against the best team from their own house or the number one teams from the other houses? Not many, I suspect. The obvious result will be that the frisbee league goes from a dozen teams to 5, one for each house. Moreover, even this isn’t very stable since it is hard to have a real league with only 5 teams. People interested in IM sports like to play those sports several times a week. Are the 5 frisbee teams going to play each other over and over again?
Now, the College might try to avoid this fate. It might try to force houses to distribute their frisbee talent equally. But such a top down scheme is very hard to enforce. How is Doug Bazuin going to know who the good frisbeers are? Even worse, gung-ho houses can avoid the dilution of their first team by “encouraging” the less talented athletes to go out for something else. “Why don’t you sign up for public speaking! We already have enough people going out for frisbee.”
Given that anchor housing and the concomitant Hogwartization of Williams is inevitable, what’s the right answer? How might we preserve and extend all that is best about IM sports at Williams while allowing Morty/CUL to incorporate IM competition in their hopeless attempt to generate house spirit?
Simple: Have two parallel and complimentary IM systems. There should be an IM soccer league run by the Office of Campus Life that is college-wide and centralized. Anyone can sign up. Captains are recruited. Teams are created fairly, perhaps even with some bias toward house unity, but with the primary focus being equality of talent. There should also be a special House competition tournament, also run by OCL that would be house-based, perhaps even requiring that the players also be a part of the college-wide league. It would feature a single tournament, perhaps over a brief period, with prizes and lots of College publicity. Morty and the CUL might attend these games.
As always, if it were me, I would just have the first sort of league. Yet at this stage, I’ll be happy if we can just prevent IM sports from being too screwed up by anchor housing.
Other suggestions would be welcome.
August 25th, 2005 at 7:45 am
I offer two other data points from my immediate experience. Both Notre Dame and Yale have the equivalent of “cluster housing.” At Notre Dame students are assigned a “house” for all four years. At Yale students spend only their freshman year away from their assigned “college”. Both schools have a considerable esprit de corps centered around the cluster, which spills over into rivalry between housing entities. As a result, participation rates in intramurals (in their various guises … alternative and parallel institutions/events have arisen) are quite high. For what it is worth, alumni satisfaction rates are among the best as well.
If one wanted to expand the data set a little, look at the intramural scene at schools with active Greek Life. Fraternities may have downsides, but they do participate actively in intramurals and inter-house competitions.
Can you construct such an identity? Well, at Rice that is precisely what the school did. They decided they needed to change campus culture, so they created a rigid dorm system (i.e., you’re assigned to a dorm and live there all four years), manufactured inter-dorm rivalry, and the result is a more vibrant campus culture.
I doubt top-down control would be necessary to form cluster centric IM teams. If cluster housing engenders any common identity (A-Gar-Wood represent!), then many teams will naturally be composed of people from the same housing clusters. Mandating the structure of intra-murals seems so unwise (mandated fun is seldom fun) that the college would never pursue it. You probably shouldn’t read too much into Morty’s comment.
I have no idea whether cluster housing will “work,” but there are models at other schools for Williams to follow.
August 25th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Not that I want to revisit the debate over anchor housing or anything . . . but a couple of points.
1) The examples of Yale/Rice/Harvard et al have very limitted relevance to Williams because the physical plant is so different. Those colleges — and every other college with anchor housing that “works” — have large dorms with co-located dining halls in which all members of a cluster work and eat. Williams doesn’t have that. Want to know how/why anchor housing won’t work at Williams? Check out Middlebury and Bowdoin.
2) You claim that participation rates in intramural sports at Yale are “quite high.” I question this claim. Or, at least, I would bet a fair amount of money that participation rates at Williams are much higher. Consider IM soccer. Since Yale only has one league for its 12 (?) houses, there can only be 12 teams at most. Back in the day, Williams had a similar number of teams in IM soccer but for a student population 1/3 the size. In other words, three times as many students play/played IM soccer at Williams than at Yale as a percentage of the student body. The comparison would be even more dramatic if you used the percentage of students not playing a varsity sport that season.
As a side note, the situation at Harvard (where I play IM sports on occasion) is much worse than that at Yale, I believe. In a 450 person house, we regularly have trouble finding 11 people to play IM soccer. I mention this not so much to point out that the anchorites should look more broadly than Yale (since they can hardly expect to replicate the most successful cluster model) but to highlight the pressure that will soon be placed on the entry/co-op system.
Three years from now, when anchor housing isn’t working too well, the cry will arise to fix it. People will look at Yale and notice that it works well and (correctly!) conclude that a reason for this is that you are associated with a house for all four years. They will then want to “fix” things at Williams by aligning entries with clusters — i.e., if and only if you live in Morgan, you are in Wood — and by assimilating co-ops into clusters. Since I am a fan of entries and co-ops as they are now, I don’t like this.
You read it here first.
August 30th, 2005 at 6:29 am
Another item to add to the long laundry list of things the fraternity system did better! Apologies in advance to all who are offended by the dreaded “f” word.