From the house essays in the College yearbook (the Gulielmensian ), we can see that some of the houses were making a real effort to adjust to the new Williams social system, while some of the fraternities still refused to cooperate. The Garfield House essay begins:

With the advent of the first year of the “New Williams,” Delta Upsilons stepped into its new role without missing a stride. Under the awesome auspices of James A. Garfield House, it has succeeded in a way almost unique to any other house in integrating the old fraternity ideals with the new college realities. This year has witnessed the continuation and development of a strong and spirited sense of brotherhood, without the old “Greek” overtones. Each D.U.-Garf takes tremendous pride in being a member of the “Zoo,” a house which has shown its excellence in all phases of College life at Williams. ( Gulielmensian 1965)

Link to Williams history article on frats

In practice, the boys who wanted to be part of the quasi-frats gravitated to house-centric activties and those boys who didn’t avoided their row houses like the plague.

I’m asking for pure speculation. If the housing lottery returned to whatever it was just before the Neighborhood constraints, would certain types of students end up where they ended up before.

Yes. I think it would revert and revert as quickly as the lottery rules allowed or could be circumvented. Nothing has changed in the underlying issues that would keep the campus from naturally re-segregating. It is possible that the location of certain self-segregated cohorts might change. For example, if they kept Mission as first-year housing, then that would force some changes rippling through the system. But, there would be an Odd Quad somewhere. There would be dorms segregated along racial lines somewhere. There would be segregated enclaves of certain sports teams and heavy drinking — somewhere.

Housing systems are tricky things. They can be used to effect change, but I think it has to be done with tiny nudges. Housing systems also have to be in synch with the underlying campus culture — which is why Morty’s cluster housing scheme was destined to fail. He needed to address the underlying culture first, then the housing could follow.

Gifford: I’m not sure that was Giff’s position. The idea (in brief, as I remember it) was that the Row House people lived and dined together somewhat “exclusively” and contributed to a College which was socially fragmented.

OK. that makes sense. And, I would agree with Gifford in that case. For all intents and purposes, Gifford was describing the same social fragmentation that launched Morty on his cluster housing kick to start with.

This new Neighborhood Housing report outlines the social fault line in pretty stark terms:

White
Male
Athelete
Heavy Drinking

—-

Non-white
Female
Non-athlete
Non Heavy Drinking

It’s the same fault line that has appeared in every other report — the report on Diversity, the report on Alcohol, the report on Athletics. The sad irony is that the below-the-line group is significantly larger in numbers than the above the line group, but they keep bearing the brunt of these social-engineering efforts. One of these days, an administrator is going to wake up and say, ‘wait a minute, why don’t we leave the large below-the-line group alone and address the issue with the smaller above-the-line group? The tail keeps wagging the dog here. White, male, heavy-drinking athletes are a decided minority at Williams college (25% tops), yet they continue to be ID as one side of a fault line that causes friction.

I’m asking for pure speculation. If the housing lottery returned to whatever it was just before the Neighborhood constraints, would certain types of students end up where they ended up before.

For example, as I recall the Quad by Driscoll tended to have a particular type of student. Would that type of student naturally or automatically want to be in that Quad.

And, has the campus population changed over the past 4 years so that the distribution of student types is different now.

In the Williams situation– it’s hard to find an objective thought in my head, and be sure of it. Williams has a great housing and dining system. I’m not entirely a fan of free agency; I’m not entirely a fan of regulation and housing systems; I sure know that Williams has caused more headaches …

But my idea would be typically that of a Deep Springer: as much as you can, hand the task and the responsibility to those most impacted– the students. Let them design their own systems (with a little help and some constraints), and they will do far better than you or I.

I don’t know exactly when Oberlin’s financial troubles started. They are the classic example of diluting their endowment with enrollment growth and suddenly realizing that they can no longer afford to keep up with the Jones. Part of their fianancial recovery plan (this predates the market crash) was to shrink the size of the student body (and therefore bolster the per student endowment).

In any case, I agree with David that the dining issue is somewhat tangential to the housing situation at Williams.

An interesting question is: Now what? How do they unwind this whole cluster housing disaster? I am convinced that it will happen sooner rather than later because there are some budget savings to be had. I’m thinking they start “backdooring” the decision with some housing lottery rules changes that effectively gut the cluster housing plan and restore de facto free agency. I think those changes could start as early as the spring lottery.

Williams has terrific housing and dining, BTW. The College should stop trying to re-engineer it to address perceived problems. If they perceive problems, then deal with those directly instead of screwing up the housing system and making the original problems worse for more students.

GOFFs: that was me :), and I remember your previous comments.

Gifford: I’m not sure that was Giff’s position. The idea (in brief, as I remember it) was that the Row House people lived and dined together somewhat “exclusively” and contributed to a College which was socially fragmented. Honestly, nothing I can say about the situation of “frat parties” compares to your reporting of the situation…

Oberlin: I’m not trying to be oppositional, and would prefer not. The web page I refer to says that RAs/VAs/HLECs live throughout all parts of the Oberlin housing system, making the Co-Ops/Village/etc part of Oberlin’s College Housing, and that is my recollection. My recollection was also that the Co-Ops are particularly cheaper to operate. Oberlin’s financial balance is not anything I can speak about.(*) Has any of this changed?

(*) If Dodd/Driscoll are truly on the line, I’m certainly, however, going to speak up and say their may be other options and other arrangements beyond the obvious.

The Gifford Report is oddly unclear on that detail, as I remember. There is the distinct impression that the problem was that the Row House Kitchens were funded by the College, but used by the residents as their personal domains, thus, that the Row House Residents were effectively socially isolated…

Don must have been enjoying a fine Guinness Stout if he actually believed that. The row houses hosted the “frat parties” in the 1970s, just as they had done in the 60s and 50s and 40s and 30s. Probably with the same proprietary drink recipes that Messirs Swart and Ubile have described for us. The row houses were never “socially isolated”. They were the social center of the campus.

The issue was that a signficant percentage of the students were GDI-types and wanted nothing to do with the row houses. I went to mine for Sunday brunch every week as a sophmore because having a chef make me an omlette to eat while reading tne New York Times and watching football worth the walk. I never set foot in a party there. My wife never set foot in a party there and nobody I know from Williams ever set foot in the row house parties. If we had wanted that kind of social scene, we would have gone to Amherst or some other school with fraterinies. The fact that Williams had banned frats was a positive feature/benefit in selling Williams and those of us who chose Williams specifically for that reason had no interest in quasi-frats.

Why the Williams administrators keep trying to impose a bizarre psuedo-frat model on the campus is beyond me. If they want frats, then bring back frats. Problem solved.

But there’s a big difference between living as an individual above Goff’s and cooking in my own kitchen, and living in a building owned by the College, with 80 other students, with a dining operation organized by a student association nominally supported by the College, and where any other student of the College can, on any given night, drop by, show their ID, and eat.

I don’t believe that’s the case anymore. Oberlin is not involved in the co-ops in any fashion. They don’t even do the billing. I’m trying to be polite, but Oberlin has been “broke” for a number of years. As most colleges that are out of equilibrium, Oberlin has slashed student services, often by outsourcing them.

Dining halls are the first to go.

BTW, I never lived over GOFFs. Most of the time, I lived in a large house with five or six friends and we shopped and cooked as our own “co-op”. This was quite common at Williams at the time. There were several houses full of students in various places. Water Street. Cole Ave.

34 Tyler
25 Spencer
30 Agard
41 Garfield
28 Perry
30 Wood
28 Brooks

Two additional “houses” came on-line in the early 1970s. Dodd House was the old Treadway Williams Inn which became a dorm with a dining hall. I think this was initially a woman’s “house”, but I could be wrong. Tyler House is a modern cinder block dorm that came on line in 1972 adjacent to Tyler House. If you want to count that, the capacity of “houses” increases by 90 with these two new additions in the early 1970s.

50 Dodd
40 Tyler Annex

Note that freshmen were not affiliated with houses and did not eat there except for a special welcome dinner in the spring to the best of my recollection. I think that sophmores were allowed to eat Sunday brunch and a guest dinner each week in their row house.

One of the issues that has confounded Williams’ romantic notion of the “house system” is that the house system was never intended to accommodate the much larger size of the college. I don’t have the exact numbers, but, at the start of coedducation in 1971, Willisms was only 1200 to 1400 students, probably 1000 to 1200 when fraternities were abolished. The construction of “modern” dorms and dining halls (Greylock, Mission, Prospect, Driscoll) changed the scale of the college in a way that simply was incongruous with the old models.

1980: It was similar in the 80s. You could express a preference for a group (like Greylock) but not a specific house. Once you were assigned to Carter, that is where you stayed for three years, unless you went through an uncommonly used transfer system. The Record articles are good, but not completely accurate.

We picked Mission because it was the only place all 6 of us could live together. I think you could go into Greylock in a group of 4 max.

That had changed that by spring 1985. The max was 4 and it was constant across groups. (I recall that clearly.) Did it really vary by location in your era? Perhaps that was a conscious attempt to make Mission more popular?

By my time, Mission was far and away the least popular. I did not know anyone who ended up in Mission who had not ranked Greylock higher. (Main preference was for singles.) Dodd and Row Houses had their fans as well.

If you were in Mission, you lived there all 3 years, Greylock the same: it was not the case that Mission was mostly sophomores and Greylock mostly juniors, although I know this did happen in the late 1980s. I am surprised to see the reference to a 1980 Record article that contradicts me on this – are you sure that date is correct? A lot of sophomores lived in Mills, and then spent junior year in their actual Mission house (Armstrong, Pratt or Dennett) – Mills was sort of overflow housing. I lived in Mission sophomore and junior year and don’t remember anybody moving out to Greylock. By senior year, nearly all of us who had lived in Mission moved off campus.

, the quasi-frat model can only pushed the limits of riduculous extremes and the notion that living in Mission Park could ever mimic frat house living was definitely at the outer limits of those extremes

I laughed at that. If you read the planning documents– they took that notion, oh-so-seriously. Nothing like believing your own…

1) re: administration. The phrase “sophomore ghetto” came from the Dean’s Office. I heard students repeat it, but… there are complex factors (how many affiliation switches do you allow; do you allow seniors to switch with sophomores?). But I think you’re factually wrong.

2) re: Row House Dining. There’s a consideration of fact there, and a consideration of judgment and policy. I believe the Gifford report presents some data here– but how many people lived in the Row Houses in 1984? How many students who didn’t live there, also dined there?

3) How many of the sophomore class WANTED to live in Mission? How many of them did this because of class alliance– as opposed to wanting to have 5-7 friends together, and Mission was the only option? How many people would have preferred to affiliate with a larger group of friends from multiple entries? Even the Gifford Report thesis, that students bond into small social groups… well, the problem with the Gifford Committee, is right there. It took a contingency (people bonding into cliques) and wrote it into housing policy…

(Perhaps I am wrong on the facts and 50%, or whatever, of students in 1972 ate in row houses.)

There’s a semantic trap to watch out for. Technically, the Greylock and Mission Park dining halls were “row house” dining halls as both of those large dorm complexes were divided into four pseudo-row houses with (presumably) all the same quasi-frat trappings. Of course, the quasi-frat model can only pushed the limits of riduculous extremes and the notion that living in Mission Park could ever mimic frat house living was definitely at the outer limits of those extremes — especially in the orginal nuclear-fallout bomb shelter configuration of the dorm.

However, I think you may have missed parts of the situation:

http://www.oberlin.edu/resed/employment/prostaff/housing.html

The co-ops were not “co-ops” as at Williams; Williams does not really have co-ops, just senior apartments with common kitchens.

It looks like the number of co-ops has declined, that Asia / Village / some themes can plan meals, etc. Though it’s been close to a decade since I’ve been there, a core part of the system was that you could generally eat where you wished — a student living in “traditional housing” could use their card to eat at a co-op, and I believe in Village, etc; and students certainly had the ability to organize new options.

I also believe the co-ops were *cheaper* than the traditional plans, in general. (As a former head of dining services, I did have some interest).

The Gifford report cited employee benefits for Row House dining employees, and additional costs for students who would go down to the kitchens and prepare food, as the primary cost overruns. No data, but I’m inclined to wonder on the second, and if you looked at the raw figures… we’re speaking of a couple hundred dollars per student, per year. Charge a fee.

@David: the Gifford report included data on the figures you report. You seem to be assume a default where only the people in the Row Houses, eat in the Row Houses — (and event then!). The default should be that any student can eat in any house if that is convenient to them.

Ken:

I would not hold out Oberlin as an exemplar of fiscal excellence. I have not checked in them since the market collapse, but two years ago, they were in a rather dire financial situation with aa budget that was significantly out of equiliibrium and a strategic plan to address the problem of unsustainable endowment spending.

I’ve been curious how Oberlin is whethering the current economic storm. Either I’ve lost my Google skills or Oberlin is being notatbly tight-lippeed on their website. I do not expect a pretty picture.

Oberlin no longer offers dining in houses with one exception.

Oberlin Dining

For a campus of 3500 undergrads and conservatory students, they have:

a) Two dining halls
b) One dining hall (lunch only)
c) One snack bar
d) Two coffee cart/coffee bars (science center and library)

The only house dining option is a buffet dining room serving (and note that I am quoting here) “traditional soul food cuisine” in the Afrikan Heritage House. This dining is only available on limited days.

Their entire dining operation is contracted out to Bon Appetite Management Company, which contracts the food services at the following colleges:

American University
Biola University
Case Western Reserve University
Dominican University of California
Emmanuel College
Goucher College
Hamilton College
Lesley University
Lewis & Clark College
Macalester College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mount St. Mary’s College
Northwestern College
Oberlin College
Reed College
Seattle University
St. Olaf College
University of Pennsylvania
University of Redlands
University of San Francisco
Washington University in St. Louis
Whitman College
Woodbury University

Generally, out-sourcing of dining management is implemented as a cost-saving move. There are pros and cons, but it unquestionably removes a liberal arts college one step away from managing its own undergraduate experience.

Mission generally got pretty much filled up before the smaller doubles in random houses elsewhere, yes. Near the end of the sophomore picking, the options for your group often became either pick into separate mission suites with one or two empty rooms in them that may or may not be near each other or pick the few small doubles in junior/senior housing that were undesirable in general. by the lat 20 or 30 groups of students, that decision became one each person had to struggle with.

It was a very stressful decision to have to make for people. It was far from ideal and one of the things that seemed unfair was that there was no bonus towards getting a good pick in the future…so it was quite possible (and statistically to be expected) that some percentage of williams students would, each year, get the sh*t end of the stick in terms of picks compared to their classmates. that always seemed a bit off to me and not only because i had somewhat low picks two of three years.

and now, for something I’ve otherwise never said before…my brother and mother both believed swarthmore did room selection better with some sort of two-tiered lottery system. I suspect that their system might not work for williams’ dorms, but i also never listened to them explain it because i was always fine with my living situation.

1) Pre Free Agency (approximately 89 to 94). Students were assigned to specific houses. You had a spot in Carter or Pratt or Dodd or wherever. Only 1/3 (or so) of the students assigned to Pratt were Sophomores. But 90% of the people who lived in Pratt were Sophomores because lots of Sophomores assigned to Carter/Dodd/wherever traded with seniors assigned to Pratt. This trading benefited both parties.

The senior got to live in a nice house (and had a high pick in that house.) Very few seniors had any interest in living in Mission.

The sophomore got to live in Pratt with all her sophomore buddies, but she maintained her Carter/Dodd/wherever affiliation so that, in future years, she did not have to live in Pratt. Everyone won!

But, as often discussed here, the trading system was incredibly inefficient, stressful, annoying and (perhaps) corrupt. Everyone recognized that free agency would be an improvement.

2) Free agency (approximately 95 to 05). Sophomores no longer lived in Mission because they wanted to. They lived in Mission because they had to. By the time they got to pick, the vast majority of other houses were filled. But, especially post-renovation, sophomores found Mission living good.

Note (could be wrong about this, but my sister-in-law (’98) told this story) that, during free agency, Mission was much more popular among Sophomores than many other houses. In other words, Mission was filled well before the end of room draw. The last 10 (or 50?) sophomores had to live elsewhere because Mission was filled.

Mission was intentionally a “sophomore ghetto.” Housing policy was designed to achieve that. MANY residents DID NOT want to live there. Housing policy could have been different.

1) Whose intentions are we talking about? Not a single Williams administrator ever said: “Hey! Let’s put all the sophomores in Mission.” Williams never intended anything of the kind. Instead, when I arrived at Williams, Mission was a mix of classes. Then trading took off and the students sorted themselves so that Mission became all sophomores. Sophomores wanted to live together and Mission was the simplest/only way to make that happen. This had nothing to do with housing policy, except to the extent that trading allowed it to happen, because no Williams administrator or faculty member ever changes the policy to cause this result.

2) Obviously, housing policy could have been different. All I am trying to do is explain what Williams looked like during various time periods and why it looked that way.

In particular, I thought that Will’s claim that “we had houses that ate together” was not capturing reality. (This is not Will’s fault. I think that the Record articles miss some of this.)

When, after fraternities, did Williams ever have houses that ate together? Yes, there may have been a brief period in the 60s when this was true, but, after women/Mission/Greylock, only a tiny portion (less than 10%) of Williams students “had houses that ate together.”