In other words, these houses are popular because they’re great houses, not because they’re “where the action is” or because there’s a huge added value to cooking and cleaning with your fellow residents.

But, at the same time, lots of students would love to live in co-ops — not for the co-operative, let’s all clean the house aspect — but because small, nice houses are wonderful. Those students, right now, pretend to care about co-ops but what they really want is nice, small houses.

That’s an untested hypothesis. My admittedly small sample suggests that today’s college students actually prefer to live where the action is. I know that, in the free agency system at Swarthmore, seniors with the top numbers shun the “small, nice houses” and opt for the larger more social dorms.

As far as housing, no matter what the system is, somebody is going to be unhappy with it.

Obviously. The trick is to come up with a system that minimizes unhappiness.

When we had free agency, all anybody did was complain about it (usually the bottom 1/3 of picks). Now that it’s gone, it’s protrayed this magical world where everyone will be happy.

Portrayed by whom? No straw Ephs, please. I, and every proponent of free agency that I have ever read or talked to, recognized that free agency had flaws. It was just better than the system it replaced in the early 90s, which is why it was overwhelmingly supported by students at that time. And it was better than the Neighborhood System that replaced it in 2006, as was widely recognized by students at that time.

By the way, larger groups don’t necessarily fix things with orphan rooms b/c every house/dorm floor has different numbers of beds and you can’t just call them equal due to room size and space. If you have groups of 28, what do you do with the house of 44 rooms or 24 rooms.

See previous discussion. There are two issues. First, for next year, we might just add the set of houses described above that do have (or can be made to have) the same number of beds. Second, once the entire system is fixed, the best idea is probably to leave this to the Student Housing Committee. It will have a lot of tricky issues to deal with, just as the Junior Adviser Selection Committee has a lot of tricky issues to deal with. But, with my endless faith in Williams students, I bet that the solutions that they come up with will be excellent.

See my full report (pdf) for further thoughts.

I personally don’t support “senior only” housing at all. One of the best ways to meet other Williams students is through random living arrangements. Picking in as a 28 person group or whatever ensures that you don’t interact with other people that much.

1) This is only allowed for seniors. Now, seniors, being friendly engaged people, will interact with all sorts of people besides their 28 friends in Spencer, or wherever, especially underclassmen whom they meet in their classes, teams and activities. And that is great! But just how much senior-to-other intermixing is prevented allowing all 28 seniors to live in Spencer? I will just repeat myself from the report.

Consider a sophomore sitting down to lunch in April with a senior that she has never met before, someone from a very different background. Such lunches are, potentially, a big part of the learning that goes on outside the classroom. The problem with this lunch is not so much the event itself, but the fact that this relationship may not really develop since, in two months, the senior graduates. These two Ephs, from different backgrounds, don’t have enough opportunity to interact. The real problem, then, is with the lunch that did not happen, the lunch between this
sophomore and her fellow sophomore from that very different background. If the sophomore had lunch with a senior, she did not have lunch with her classmate, she did not start a relationship which could then develop over the next two years instead of being still-born over the next two months.

One of the goals of Williams housing policy is that these friendships and conversations represent a fair cross-section of Williams students. The more time that a student spends with others in her class, the more likely the most (stereotypically) unlikely of relationships are to develop. Senior/sophomore interaction is not a bad thing in itself. It is a bad thing because it takes the place of greater sophomore/sophomore interaction. There is more than enough diversity within each Williams class to expose every student to the full panoply of backgrounds and outlooks that the College brings together for the benefit of her education. Know your class and you will know Williams.

And the same applies to the senior herself. She might have a wonderful lunch with that sophomore. And nothing wrong with that! But keep in mind the lunch that she did not have with a different senior, a senior that she might have known a little in Mission or in Prospect, a senior who she had gotten to know some but not very well. Perhaps the lunch that does not happen with that senior would have been a meaningful conversation, a thought-provoking exchange of ideas that was only possible because they had become comfortable with each other over the previous three years.

Back to JG:

I fully support turning more small houses into co-ops like the other Dodd Quad houses, Woodbridge (already has a kitchen). There are likely others I’m forgetting or a somewhat small row house or two in which this could be feasible (sub-24 beds). A co-op is supposed to involve actual co-operative living through cooking or meals or whatever. It’s more work than most college students want to put in to coordinate that (even among 6-8 people), and without neighborhoods I think there will be somewhat of a return to normalcy in numbers of applicants.

I think that everyone agrees that co-ops are wonderful and that there should be more of them. But, at the same time, lots of students would love to live in co-ops — not for the co-operative, let’s all clean the house aspect — but because small, nice houses are wonderful. Those students, right now, pretend to care about co-ops but what they really want is nice, small houses. I think that the College should care as much about them as it does about would-be co-opees. The solution, obviously, is to expand senior housing to everyone who wants it.

And, as I have said, nothing would prevent the Senior Housing Committee from giving preferences for co-ops to people who really wanted that aspect, and were willing to be serious about it by going off the mean plan.

Re: co-ops, bear in mind that even under the old system absent neighborhood drama, without a top 10 pick in the co-op draw, many many groups always just dropped out. They have an idea of living in one or two particular houses and absent those, they take a shot at the regular draw.

Yes. And thanks for bringing this history to light. But I suspect that those students are precisely the ones who would band together to create a larger group to pick into Perry or Wood or wherever.

Now that co-op residents are allowed to be on the meal plan (and thus do not actually have to cook as a cooperative), I think it’s unlikely that absent neighborhoods co-op levels would fall off too much. As has been previously discussed, co-op demand started spiking with this meal plan change several years before neighborhoods.

Personally, I think this is the change that should be made with co-ops–go back to requiring students in co-ops to drop the meal plan. I think you’ll see co-op demand drop pretty drastically then, and the co-op “shortage” we see right now won’t look quite as bad.

As far as housing, no matter what the system is, somebody is going to be unhappy with it. When we had free agency, all anybody did was complain about it (usually the bottom 1/3 of picks). Now that it’s gone, it’s protrayed this magical world where everyone will be happy. But it at least allowed more freedom. By the way, larger groups don’t necessarily fix things with orphan rooms b/c every house/dorm floor has different numbers of beds and you can’t just call them equal due to room size and space. If you have groups of 28, what do you do with the house of 44 rooms or 24 rooms.

As far as the old system…there are lots of suite style set-ups that are in the 4-6 people range, so the max of 6 under my era of free agency made some sense to me, although I think a max of 8 would be better to provide enough flexibility.

I personally don’t support “senior only” housing at all. One of the best ways to meet other Williams students is through random living arrangements. Picking in as a 28 person group or whatever ensures that you don’t interact with other people that much. Seems odd. I think juniors should have the option to be in the co-op draw. Mixed class-year groups do get lower priority because of that, so under the current system it’s unlikely they would get into a co-op, which leads to…

I fully support turning more small houses into co-ops like the other Dodd Quad houses, Woodbridge (already has a kitchen). There are likely others I’m forgetting or a somewhat small row house or two in which this could be feasible (sub-24 beds). A co-op is supposed to involve actual co-operative living through cooking or meals or whatever. It’s more work than most college students want to put in to coordinate that (even among 6-8 people), and without neighborhoods I think there will be somewhat of a return to normalcy in numbers of applicants.

Re: co-ops, bear in mind that even under the old system absent neighborhood drama, without a top 10 pick in the co-op draw, many many groups always just dropped out. They have an idea of living in one or two particular houses and absent those, they take a shot at the regular draw. I didn’t have a very high number and still lived in Poker Flats (actually pretty amazing living quarters) but most people acted like it was Siberia because it was a whoppping 12 minute leisurely walk to the furthest academic building. Housing involves everyone’s most finicky and silly reactions.

Anyway, long way of saying I don’t much care about neighborhoods, but if people don’t like them, scrap them. But I caution that Free Agency isn’t some perfect system – the people on the bottom are always pissed about how it goes and someone always gets stuck in the last double in the basement of someplace or other. There should be some guarantee that if you’re in the bottom XX% (whatever that number is) that you won’t be that low the following year.

Edited to fix typos…

RE: #2

I’ll have to leave that one for others to discuss. I’m on record as thinking that the rigid division the Williams student body by class affiliation has a significant negative impact on the campus culture. I believe that it is a significant contributor to both the alcohol and diversity problems perceived to exist on campus. I understand that I’m probably the lone voice in the entire Williams community who feels that way.

RE: #3

I don’t know if Williams needs more parties or not. I’ve never seen anything that really suggests a major issue with the number of parties, one way or the other. I assume there are parties open to any student, every weekend. Is that incorrect?

If the goal is the most efficient matching of available student rooms with student preference, then just run a campus-wide lottery and let the free market work.

Goodness knows that I love the free market and that I spent endless time making suggestions in order to save Free Agency (at least from the backseat: Fight the Power I, II, III, IV, and V.) And, I agree that Free Agency is better than Neighborhoods.

But, I think that my plan is better than the old free agency for a variety of reasons.

1) It solves the problem of orphan rooms (and similar rules would be needed in order to create pick groups of 2 and 4 and 6 in Greylock).

2) It does a better job of binding students to their classes and, therefore, to Williams. Although we all love to brag that Williams has greater alumni loyalty than almost any place else, or absolute amount of loyalty is, from one point of view, sort of pathetic. 40% of graduates don’t even feel connected enough to the school (or to their classmates who ask them for money) that they don’t contribute. Williams ought to do way better and class-based living is one method of getting there.

3) Williams needs more parties, thrown by more people. If you can group all the partiers and put them into houses in which throwing parties is easy, you will get more parties.

The free market is a wonderful thing. We do want to gives students choice. But we most want a set of rules and conventions that maximizes happiness for the campus as a whole and which ties alumni more closely to Williams in the future.

a) President wanted it.

b) President shoved it down the throat of the campus.

c) President is gone.

d) Cluster housing ends (like the fall of the Berlin Wall).

I could be wrong. If someone can point to a single supporter of cluster housing at Williams College, I’d love to hear it.

If the goal is the most efficient matching of available student rooms with student preference, then just run a campus-wide lottery and let the free market work.

There are so many factors that contribute to the perceived value of a room: location, building, size, friends. Just give students a lottery number and let them “spend it” on the available combination that best suits their preferences, applying whatever weight they choose to the various factors.

BTW, co-op style houses didn’t come about becasue of some overwhelming demand. These houses were purchased by the College during he hyper-growth of the 1970s when the College couldn’t afford to build dorms for all of the new students it was enrolling. Many of what are now co-op houses intiially housed women.

If it weren’t for trying to circumvent the housing restrictions, I’m not sure the demand would be particularly strong. Swarthmore has several of these beautiful old houses very close to campus and they aren’t very popular in the lottery. Ironically, they tend to attract quiet, non-party types of students while the more social students gravitate towards the dorms.

Why not get rid of the “absolute” rules against neighborhood mixing, and instead make it a preference system? In other words, keep running room draw by neighborhoods, but allow people to have room draw groups of any potential mixture. Then, in neighborhood draw give preference to the groups with the highest % of neighborhood residents.

You must always keep in mind that Williams has decided, for good or for ill, that it will not allow theme housing, especially theme housing that crosses class lines and occurs in the same house year after year.

Historically, Tyler/Tyler Annex was dominated by male helmet sport athletes. The College does not want that to happen again. The problem with your preference plan is that this could happen.

Any plan (unless incoming President Falk has radically different ideas on this issue) must prevent theme housing. Neighborhood Housing does this by splitting the campus into four parts and preventing (?) groups from coalescing in any one neighborhood. My plan does this by segregating housing by class and forcing (essentially) all sophomores and seniors to live in such large buildings that theme housing is impossible.

Basically, this would create incentives to live in your neighborhood with people from your neighborhood, but still allow people to essentially live where they wanted with who they wanted.

I hope that Williams is finally coming to the realization that Neighborhoods are doomed to failed no matter what. No matter how much money you spend and schemes you try, three factors (entries, infrastructure, study-abroad/off-campus/co-ops) make it impossible to ever develop neighborhood identity.

Why not get rid of the “absolute” rules against neighborhood mixing, and instead make it a preference system? In other words, keep running room draw by neighborhoods, but allow people to have room draw groups of any potential mixture. Then, in neighborhood draw give preference to the groups with the highest % of neighborhood residents. For example, a group of 5 with four spencer residents and one Dodd residence would have an 80% Spencer “rating” (or whatever), and would therefore get a bump up or down in draw corresponding to this (probably up if they enter Spencer’s room draw but down if they enter Dodd’s). Whether to make this an absolute preference or not, well, that’s your call (ie: would ALL of the 80% pick before ALL of the 60%, or would the algorithm instead just give people a “bonus” for having a higher quotient that could still allow some lucky 60%ers to pick before unlucky 80%ers). You could also build in some exceptions, so that people could “pull” in one person from outside of the neighborhood without affecting their pick number. It could either be an absolute open system with people being able to pick in to any neighborhood, or the system could require at least one person from a neighborhood to be in a group for that group to be able to pick into that neighborhood. Another consideration is whether people would “keep” their original neighborhood identification throughout their four years. In other words (presumably to prevent gaming the system), will a former Spencer resident who ends up in Dodd as a junior still be treated as a Spencer resident in their senior year Dodd room draw? If you wanted to get really fancy you could count them as a % resident of each neighborhood based on how much time they’ve spent in that neighborhood (so someone who was in Spencer as a sophomore and Dodd as a junior would “count” as “half” a Dodd resident for their senior year room draw–I like this idea because it discourages gaming the system without significantly penalizing transfer residents throughout all four years of their time at Williams).

The more I think about this, the more excited I am. Basically, this would create incentives to live in your neighborhood with people from your neighborhood, but still allow people to essentially live where they wanted with who they wanted. If you want to live with 4 people from 4 different neighborhoods but stay in Spencer, well, you could! You probably wouldn’t end up with the best housing in Spencer, but that’s not too awful of a trade-off. Furthermore, if we wanted, we could “strengthen” the neighborhood solidarity advantage for the neighborhood anchor houses (or whatever we’re calling them these days) to encourage Dodd/Spencer/Wood/Currier House to be a high % of neighborhood residents.

Your thoughts?

Turning West into a co-op is silly.

Just to be clear, I am changing the definition of co-op, or, perhaps better, just placing the co-op houses into a larger category of “senior houses.” These are houses which are only open to seniors and which have a specific housing process. Some of these houses have kitchens. Some do not.

The point is that we want to come up with a system which places 325 seniors (224 above spots plus 101 current co-op beds) into 325 beds in such a way that maximizes senior class happiness. Several people (can’t find the links right now) have commented that the current co-op process is flawed precisely because it generates lots of orphan rooms. If there was no better way, then that would just be life. But there is a better way.

But, you are right that this is not a necessary part of the process. If you just allow larger groups (of, say, 8) then these groups, as long as they had knowledge of who was picking where before them, would be able to make sensible choices.

2) That said, a possible advantage of this process is that it avoids the problem of orphan rooms. (These specific examples have been mentioned to me by college officials.) Back during free agency, 23 seniors men who like to drink pick into Spencer together. Everybody’s happy, right? Not so fast. There are still five rooms left in Spencer and someone has to live there. During free agency, these rooms often went to folks with low picks and very different preferences than the senior men. Much conflict arose. We want to avoid that. We want to do our best to ensure that everyone is a house with less than 30 residents wants to be there. (I agree that West is too big for that to be necessary or reasonable.)

So, the reason that 28 person groups are a good idea is that it ensures that everyone in the house has made an affirmative decision to be there. Any other system will always leave extra rooms here and there.

3) HWC writes:

Honestly, if the goal is turn the frat houses back into autonomous housing, just bring back the frats and be done with it.

The goal is, for seniors only, to bring back some of the best aspects of frats — living together with 20+ people who you want to live with in a much more intimate setting than the typical college dorm — without the bad aspects of the frat era.

Here is a test of success. I bet that, right now, there are few (any?) examples of the students in Perry or Spencer or wherever pooling their own money and buying t-shirts that celebrate their houses with some sort of goofy slogan or in-joke. (It would not surprise me if there were some such examples during free agency. I have not heard of any.) I bet that this sort of stuff would happen if 28 person rooming groups were given preference.

Otherwise, just run a housing lottery, with rules to push it in the direction the College prefers, and let students weigh their own tradeoffs of building style, location, room size, building-mates, etc.

That is just what I am doing (pdf). The rules are somewhat complex because a) the College wants to force students into class-specific buildings and b) the housing stock is quite varied.

Other than theme housing (sports team, ethnic group, etc.), I can’t even imagine how anyone could go about putting together a “blocking group” of 28 students.

What he said. Turning West into a co-op is silly.

But I’m impressed by your ability to get the data, David. Nice job.

Fraternities had those numbers, but they didn’t just materialize at the start of senior year. The membership was sustained by ongoing, intensive recruiting activities, year after year after year.

I don’t really understand the problem that trying to be fixed here. West College isn’t a co-op house. It’s a dorm.

Honestly, if the goal is turn the frat houses back into autonomous housing, just bring back the frats and be done with it.

Otherwise, just run a housing lottery, with rules to push it in the direction the College prefers, and let students weigh their own tradeoffs of building style, location, room size, building-mates, etc.