The Neighborhood Review Committee has issued its Interim Report (pdf). Record coverage here. Don’t want to read a thousand words from me on this topic? No worries! Summary:

I told you so! The Neighborhood System has failed, in just the way that I (and others) predicted it would. Students don’t care about their neighborhoods, and never will. They are angry that they can’t live with their friends. The obvious solution is my Vision for Williams Housing. Put sophomores in the Berkshire Quad, juniors in Greylock and allow large groups of seniors to pick into entire row houses. Allow free agency within those constraints. Bring back WSO plans to allow sorting along the loud/quiet dimension.

Details below.

1) Want to fully understand this debate? Best way is to read the 100+ posts on EphBlog on Anchor/Cluster Housing over the last 5+ years in chronological order. (Start at the bottom of this page.) We link to all the key documents, cover all the major parts of the debate and document the arguments that were made at the time. I had hoped to turn all these posts (and the associated comment threads) into a giant pdf, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

In retrospect, my key mistake was not to save copies of the WSO threads. That part of the history is (irretrievably?) lost. Who remembers the seemingly endless debates between Noah Smith-Drelich ‘07 and Joe Shoer ‘06? Who recalls the remarkable analysis by Jonathan Landsman ‘05 of the failures of the 2003-2004 reform efforts and the implications of those failures for Neighborhood Housing? I do! Great stuff.

2) Kudos to the Neighborhood Review Committee (led by Dean Karen Merrill and Vice President of Operations Steve Klass) for making the report public. Transparency is always a good idea. The pdf provided by the Dean’s Office does not include the 4 Appendices. Why not? Appendix A is the 2005 Report (available here). Since that is public anyway, why not include it? Appendices B, C, and D include data of various kinds. None of it seems secret or embarrassing. Why not share it with the rest of us, or at least with on-campus members of the community? It is hard to have a fully informed opinion on the Report without access to that information.

3) The Report mentions feedback.

The Committee now seeks feedback on the report and will work with College Council and the Committee on Undergraduate Life to structure public discussions of the report. In addition, individuals on campus are encouraged to post their comments on the Neighborhood Review Committee’s website, which can be found on the homepage of the Dean’s Office under “News” at www.williams.edu/dean.

…

With the public circulation of its report, the Neighborhood Review Committee now seeks feedback from the Williams College community, especially current students. We are eager to work with College Council and the Committee on Undergraduate Life to organize public forums around the issues raised in this report and to identify specific constituencies with whom members of the Neighborhood Review Committee should meet for discussion. In addition, the website for the Neighborhood Review Committee will provide an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to respond to the report in concrete and, we hope, productive ways.

Good stuff! Alas, there is, in fact, no such mechanism for providing feedback. With luck, this will be fixed soon. In the meantime, you always have EphBlog! Since I will be providing another week’s worth of commentary, I suspect that we will have some Committee members among our readers.

4) Overall, the Report is extremely high quality. Who was the primary author? (Find someone who uses words like “trope” and “anomie.”) Kudos! One of the pleasures of commenting on “All Things Ephs” is that the members of Williams community, especially the faculty, are so smart and careful that their written work is uniformly excellent. Of course, I have a bunch of specific complaints/criticisms below, but these are largely quibbles. I think that the Report has accurately summarized the current state of play. It is worth your time.

5) Is Neighborhood Housing on the way out? I was amazed at how critical the Report was. The authors pulled no punches.

The 2009 survey data on Neighborhood housing make clear that students are dissatisfied. When prompted for positive aspects of the Neighborhood system, approximately 22% of respondents could think of nothing that satisfied them. But the bluntest question – “how satisfied are you with the Neighborhood System” – gave the most telling responses: while 70.5% of students described themselves as overall dissatisfied with the system and another 12.5% felt neutral or had no opinion, only 17% felt somewhat satisfied or very satisfied.

Harsh! Extensive supporting evidence is provided. The Record summarizes:

The Committee identified six main student contentions made apparent by the survey data: a lack of freedom to live with friends or near classes; a questioning as to whether residential life is the appropriate place or means for the College to pursue diversity; a feeling of isolation on the part of minority student groups; a sense that heavy drinking is now more spread out across campus, infringing on quieter students; questions of neighborhood inequality; and a feeling of unfair housing allocation.

The Report is a damning indictment of the results of Neighborhood Housing. And, yes, I did predict this in 2005.

The real problems come later. Five years from now, if [when! -- ed.] cluster housing is implemented and when all current students have forgotten life under free agency, it will be clear (to those with eyes to see) that anchor housing has failed. There will be no meaningful cluster identity. Students will be no more a part of the Tyler cluster in 2010 than they are part of Tyler house in 2005.

[The original proposal included 5 clusters, one of which was Tyler. My main mistake was to predict five years. It only took four and a half.]

Want a crystal ball for the future of Williams? Read EphBlog.

What is interesting is not the failure of Neighborhood Housing itself (we forecast that), but the College’s readiness to admit the failure. If Neighborhood Housing were sacrosanct (like, say, affirmative action in admissions), then this report would be written very differently. The willingness of senior officials like Merrill and Klass to sign off on a report with this tenor demonstrates that we may be able to get rid of Neighborhoods. HWC writes:

This is a comprehensively negative assessment. They don’t even try to pretty it up with a thin coat of academic whitewash. I don’t even see where this report provides an avenue for attempting to fix the neighborhood housing scheme. I think you are going to see the whole idea scrapped sooner, rather than later, probably along with the closing of Dodd and Driscoll dining halls.

Agreed, although I bet that no dining hall is closed.

6) Certain sections of the Report annoy me.

The Committee also drew on the 2005 report by the Committee on Undergraduate Life, which provided the essential blueprint for the Neighborhood system; past student surveys; and information from Facilities and Dining Services.

Is that all that the Committee drew on? Either the Committee is misleading us about the extent of the material that they used (my guess) or they did an incompetent job of gathering material. First, why wouldn’t you also consult material from the 2002 CUL reports? That discussion is the start, for most practical purposes, of the debate over housing at Williams. Second, why wouldn’t you consult the April 2005 letter (pdf) that Anchors Away sent to every trustees? This is a key document from the foes of Neighborhood Housing. Now, it would be wonderful if the Report were to cite our discussions at EphBlog (I know at least one member of the committee who has read them). But there is no excuse for either not reading or not mentioning a formal letter to the Trustees. (And, by the way, that letter looks even better now then it did in 2005. If only someone had listened to us . . . )

The Neighborhood system, which began in the 2006-07 academic year, must be understood in light of the evolution of residential life at Williams. The 2005 CUL Report in Appendix A does an excellent job describing this history in which the “strong house era” followed the end of fraternities; the “weak house era” emerged in the wake of shifting student dining from houses to dining halls; and the so-called “free agency era” developed out of some student dissatisfaction with upperclass housing assignments.

“Excellent?!?” Give me a break. Professor Will Dudley’s ‘89 report had many fine qualities (and I am a Dudley fan) but its description of the history of housing at Williams is highly misleading, as I document here, here, here and here. (Fans will want to read this entire collection of posts.) Will Dudley has done many wonderful things at Williams, but his history of Williams housing was incomplete and misleading. Whether by chance or by design, it was constructed to convince the community of the likely success of Neighborhoods. Even worse, it was so well written that it could easily give, and did give, uninformed readers the impression that it was an “excellent history.” The most dangerous snow jobs are the ones where you can’t even see the whiteness.

Looking for some Schadenfreude? Looking at this Dudley Power Point presentation from 2005 of the goals for the cluster system is like considering Neocon fantasies from early 2003 about the future democratization of, first, Iraq, and then the rest of the Middle East. Worthwhile goals, to be sure. But getting from here to there . . .

7) Favorite line in the Report?

Dissatisfaction with ACE ran high in older COFHE surveys and was a major rhetorical trope in the CUL report, suggesting, at least, that Neighborhood-based event planning may be no worse than the old system.

“Trope?” Love it! Is there some Anchors Away fifth (ironic) columnist on the Committee? If I were Will Dudley, I would find this annoying. Yes, the 2005 CUL Report mentioned party problems over-and-over-and-over again, but what other material did it have to work with? How else was it going to claim that getting rid of free agency was for the better?

8) The Record coverage is adequate but not thorough. Perhaps reporter Laura Corona is planning a follow up? Why not quote some of the students (now alumni) who fought so hard against the Neighborhood system. (I would start with the organizers of Anchors Away.) Why not ask the faculty leaders in charge of foisting this disaster on us (Professors Charles Dew ‘58, Will Dudley ‘89 and Nancy Roseman) why the project failed? Why not compare and contrast the promises they made with the results their plans achieved?

Need more details? More to come next week.