The Baxter Fellow program is a failure. See here and here for excellent Record coverage. This highlights a fundamental truth about life at Williams: You can’t pay people to create community. If anything, the more money you spend, the less community you have. Instead of providing commentary on those articles, let’s take a trip to memory lane.

Lots of ranting and I-told-you-so below. And never forget The Tablecloth Colors! (more…)

Lots of fun discussion and confusion about room draw at WSO. I believe that a GetAroom e-mail just went out. Please post it in the comments.

Best part is that students are organizing the information via Willipedia. Good stuff, and invented by EphBlog. Campus Life ought to work with students to distribute this information more easily. Uncertainty is a great cause of student unhappiness. Anything which reduces uncertainty is a good thing.

Also, note that Will Dudley and Morty promised us that the new cluster-based room draw process would be way less stressful for students. Not so far!

I haven’t followed the controversy over the Housing Coordinator (HC)position nearly as closely as I should have. Apologies, loyal readers! The basic story seems to be — corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments — that the HC position has not worked very well. HCs are students who live in a particular house and are paid by the college to the put on a small number of “events” each semester, things like a Bollywood movie night or apple-picking trip. Related discussions here and here.

Problem seems to be that many HCs don’t do a very good job, both because it is a hard job to do — How do you design events that Williams students (and not just your buddies in the house) want to come to? — and because HCs have little incentive to do it well. Williams students are, after all, famously busy. There is also a question of coordination. What happens when what the HC wants to do has no connection with what house/neighborhood leadership is trying to do?

Doug Schiarra deserves credit for recognizing these problems and trying to fix them. A few years ago, he switched the HC position from something that students applied to first (and then got to pick a room in the house they wanted to live in) to something that only residents of a given house (after the normal room draw) can apply for. This seemed a good move because the central problem with screening HCs is to ensure that only students who really want to put on events should be selected, not just students who really want the benefits of being HCs. If you make the HC position too attractive, then everyone will apply even if they have no intention of doing a good job. And Williams students are smart enough to make themselves appear (especially to someone who might not know them that well) as great HC applicants even if they are not.

This whole dynamic is connected to the JA process. One of the reasons (among many others) that we don’t pay JAs is because doing so would attract the wrong sort of candidates, students who are doing it for the money as opposed to their love of the JA job. The JA process also works because the selection process is so rigorous (multiple hours of interviews) and features so many students with first-hand knowledge of the candidates.

But, with the new Baxter Fellows (replacing the HC position), the College seems to be making a mistake. As described here:

New for the 2007-2008 academic year, Currier will be hiring seven Baxter Fellows! The purpose of the Baxter Fellow program is to have students in each house whose primary role is to foster a sense of community within the Neighborhood and within the individual houses which comprise the Neighborhood in collaboration with their Neighborhood Governance Board (NGB). This is accomplished through local house responsibilities, as well as through involvement with neighborhood-wide activities that address several community-development areas. Baxter Fellows should be creative, flexible, and motivated students who are excited about being involved in their neighborhood community on many levels–from building smaller communities in their houses, to planning large-scale events for the neighborhood.

Sounds peachy-keen, eh? Better to have Baxter Fellows with a direct connection to the neighborhood leadership (since everything is centered around neighborhoods now) than House Coordinators who work for the Office of Campus Life.

The problem is that BFs are to be paid $700 and get first picks (?) for housing. The details are hazy (to me) but this seems like way too good a deal, guaranteed to generate applications from the wrong sort of students and to piss off lots of other students who don’t understand why BFs (including rising sophomores and all their roommates?) get to pick ahead of them. Indeed, if I were a sophomore in a group of 6, I would talk my buddies into all applying, at least one of us would get it (if more than one did, we would draw straws to figure out who would “accept”), and then we get first pick. Sweet!

I also predict tension between the neighborhood leadership and the BFs (see here). Anytime you mix paid and unpaid students positions, you get trouble.

See below for the application and associated e-mails.

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At some point last year, David suggested that archiving the roomdraw pamphlet would be a great idea, as a valuable record of Williams history ["future historians will thank you"]. I have just received a genuine electronic version of the 2007 roomdraw pamphlet (pdf). Feast thine eyes and satiate your curiosity. (Note that the printed-out version is folded into a booklet.)

The Record claims that “Dodd is coming to be seen as the ugly alternative to the larger, more attractive clusters.” True? I haven’t heard this before. I have my doubts. How many students applied to switch out? I can’t remember anyone claiming that Dodd was significantly less desirable than the other clusters in the last few years. And I looked hard for criticisms of neighborhood housing. If anything, the convenience of having a cluster-specific (and accessible from inside) dining hall seemed to make Dodd one of the more desirable clusters. There was no evidence (that I recall) that students favored other neighborhoods over Dodd during the selection process last year.

Or is this just the case of upset Record board members wanting better housing next year?

Spencer house has a welcome letter for the members of Spencer House. Since it’s an image, I can’t paste any text into a convenient blockquote and I’m too lazy to type anything out myself, but you can go and read it — a nice welcome letter, with energy and thought.

Considering the directory, the Spencer officers have been doing some work. I don’t see anything similar for Wood, Dodd, or Currier, but perhaps their web sites are in the works.

Cluster housing now has another reason to be disliked. As reported in the Record here the central fund is no more. For those who don’t know how the central fund works, it was where all the money from bracelet sales went to pay for alcohol so that the school funds would not be involved. THe central fund existed under the old social chairs comittee, but grew much larger when we decided to send out direct mail to students over the summer in 2003 when ACE began.

Now with the start of cluster housing, ACE’s role in collecting funds and planning social events is being phased out. The plan is to replace the central fund with house dues, but from my experience, the amount of people who pay house dues is very low. I don’t see anyway that house dues could replace the central fund. Also clusters are supposed to plan their own events which is supposed to replace ACE’s central planning.

Another concern the school has is keeping alcohol purchases separate from the school for liability purposes, but won’t having dues collected by a student paid by the college like a house coordinator be even more of a liability problem? The question I have, does this mean that the entire social scene will end up being phased out? Or could cluster housing actually revive the scene? My sources at school have told me that the social scene has gotten worse and worse over the last few years so I’m not going to write off a new idea, but I have serious concerns of the ability of cluster housing to properly raise the necessary funds.

Cluster pick was interesting in itself, and now room draw is in full swing for the Spencer (picking in Goodrich) and Dodd (in the Log) clusters. I have no idea what is happening with Dodd, but at least in Spencer (Spencer, West, Morgan, and two Greylock houses), seniors did strange things in picking.

For instance, within the first 10 picks, seniors picked into doubles. For another, perhaps half of the students in the first 15 picks picked into Morgan, despite the renovations that appear to make the rooms smaller and convert many rooms into bathrooms. It seems that Morgan may, if this trend continues, be full of seniors, and the rising sophomores at the end of the Spencer draw will be in Greylock rooms.

The process itself is quite smooth. Upon signing in, I was handed a lovely white armband with the Superman S symbol and “Spencer Neighborhood” printed on it in red. The HCs are walking around in bright orange T-shirts, running the whole process quite smoothly.

For alums who don’t know, here is how room pick works (I don’t know if it was this way in all the years past). You wait in the waiting area (in the Log, it’s the room by the bar; in Goodrich it’s the main hall) until your number is called. You sign in and go into the looking room (in the Log, it’s the room with the display case of many kinds of bottles or something; in Goodrich, it’s the living room). In the looking room, there are floorplans, and whiteboards with all the rooms in each house listed, and names of the people who have picked into those rooms already. When it is your turn to pick, you go into the picking room (in the Log, it’s some room off to the “top of Spring Street” side; in Goodrich, it’s the hallway by the bathrooms) and tell them where you want to pick in.

This is all completely obvious except the bit about the whiteboards and the names of the people who have already picked into those rooms. The names are kept quite up to date; HCs are walking in every few minutes to write down where the previous pick group just picked in.

So if it’s got to be Anchors/Clusters/Neighborhoods, at least it seems to be going well. We’ll see how it goes as the night progresses; please put updates in the comments, if you like.

The “GetARoom@Williams” staff recently sent out a booklet to every S.U. box detailing the way picks will work this year. Here is the general idea:

You can pick in a group of up to six, but if you want, you can split up, either into different neighborhoods or different houses. The neighborhood draw is first (March 7-9) and then the within-neighborhood room draw is second (April 11-12).

Within each class, and within each neighborhood, the neighborhood picking order is reversed for room draw, so if you were the last senior to pick into the Dodd cluster, you’re now the first senior to pick a room in the Dodd cluster, and if you were the first junior to pick into the Currier cluster, you’re now right before the sophomores when you pick a room.

Keep reading for all of the details, word for word, omitting the parts that were exactly the same last year. I have kept their arbitrary capitalization, but you’ll just have to imagine the huge range of fonts and sizes and bold and italics that the GetARoom staff sprinkles in with reckless abandon.

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As we move closer to the implementation of Anchor Housing– and as of each of David’s posts on the issue remind me of Alex Woo expressing his frustration, which in turn causes me to raise my frustration…
I thought I might offer my own sketch of the history of Housing (and projects to change it) at Williams:

Background: In the 1950s, after their freshman year, Williams students by-and-large lived in a system of privately organized “fraternities”– housing and dining institutions formally independent of the College. Each operated according to rules and traditions– principles of governance– determined by each House.

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If the pre-CUL report phase of the dispute over anchor housing was the first quarter — half? game? round? period? what is the best sports analogy? — then this Record article marks the start of the second. It bears close reading.

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Just because some of the CUL report is bad does not mean that all of it is.

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Even fans of the CUL Report on anchor housing have got to agree that it would have benefitted from proof reading by a biologist. One small example:

The current residential system, which has been in place for approximately 12 years, is the product of more than 200 years of evolution characterized by what Stephen Jay Gould described as ¡§punctuated equilibrium¡¨: long periods of gradual and relatively insignificant change have been interrupted occasionally by moments of more dramatic transformation.

By the way, can’t CUL manage to publish a version of its report that isn’t riddled with weirded out quote characters as in the above? Or perhaps there is some secret meaning to “¡§” that I am blissfully unaware of.

There’s nothing wrong with citing punctuated equilibrium, however quoted, in this context, but a more scholarly reference would have given equal if not more credit to Niles Eldredge. More amusingly, punctuated equilibrium is often referred to as “evolution by jerks,” a not so subtle reference to personality disputes in biology.

But that is small beer. The big example of biological tone deafness in the report is:

It was never decided that residential affiliation was no longer appropriate for Williams, or that there was a form of residential life better suited to the College and its students, but the introduction of the all-campus room draw made affiliation instantaneously meaningless, because students no longer lived in the same building, with the same collection of people, for more than a single year. The death of the old house system was thus thoroughly incidental, and the free agent era of today is the result of blind evolution rather than careful and deliberate design.

“Blind evolution”?! Isn’t this one of the classic lines of argument favored by creationists far and wide? Why, yes it is!

Actually, there are myriads of STRANGE PLANTS and ANIMALS having characteristics that to the superficial observer seem to be “without rhyme or reason,” that can not be accounted for by blind evolution, but show the handiwork of an intelligent Designer and Creator.

CUL, like all good creationists, does not think that “blind evolution” is a powerful force, does not believe that useful structures and practices can arise without the benefit of “design” by, presumably, groups like CUL.

Perhaps. Design certainly has a place in the governance of Williams. To cite just one of scores of examples, I think that the JA Selection Committee should have more members. This may be a good idea or it may be a bad one, but it is definately a question of design.

My issue with CUL is that they seem to denigrate the roll that evolution — blind or otherwise — played in the change in the house system from 1988 to 1992 or so. No rules were changed, but for some reason, the sophomores who had spots in the Gladden House recently vacated by Will Dudley decided that they did not want to live in Gladden. They wanted to live in Armstrong; not because Armstrong provided better housing (it didn’t) but because Mission had become the place that many, many sophomores wanted to live in.

The sophomores themselves had decided — without consulting with Will Dudley — that they wanted to live with each other, that they were better served by spending time and eating meals with Ephs that they would be at Williams with for three more years rather than with seniors who had other interests and priorities than chatting up the latest crop of sophomores.

The current housing system may reflect an evolutionary process, but that process is anything but “blind.” Former Housing Director Tom McEvoy (along with just about everyone else on campus at the time) recognized that the students — seeing perfectly well what sort of system would serve their needs — had ended affiliation themselves. Mission was more than 90% sophomores before any rule was changed. Campus wide room draw simply made more fair and rationale a system that had already evolved.

The CUL is filled with good and decent people who don’t seem to understand the history of Williams housing, at least in the last 25 years, and who are extremely distrustful of the idea that students might know what is best for themselves. Just as creationist can’t imagine the power of evolution, the CUL can’t seem to appreciate the ability of students to create their own communities, to recognize that they are better off organized living their lives in housing largely stratified by class year.

Good news: Dean Nancy Roseman is a biologist. If anyone can see through suspect appeals to the failures of “blind evolution,” it is she.

How comparable are the proposed clusters in terms of housing quality. The CUL claims that the five clusters are “reasonably equitable in terms of the physical quality of their housing stock.”

Is that true?

Not being on campus, I don’t know. But I would have guessed that the Tyler and Currier clusters would be the worst. (The CUL does note that Tyler needs some fixing up.) It would be pretty easy to look at last year’s room draw data and see how many seniors, for example, picked into each cluster. This wouldn’t be determinative (some seniors probably picked less good rooms in the Berkshire Quad because they wanted to live in that community), but it would be useful.

The CUL, seemingly not interested in data or evidence of any kind, tells us nothing on this score. Is that because the data wouldn’t say anything useful?

Surely everyone would agree that all the data (including not just class but pick number as well) should be retained and made public from this spring’s room draw.

This Record article provides the first discussion that I can find of cluster housing. Note that the original plans would not have affected free agency or campus wide room draw in any way. Cluster housing was simply a way of better organizing the dorms themselves.

“Williams students are extremely protective of their freedom of choice in selecting housing options and nothing being proposed will impinge on those freedoms,” Swisher said.

Famous last words.

In its discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of free agency, the CUL claims that:

The most regrettable (and ironic) consequence of the free agent system is that increased choice has diminished student autonomy, which has traditionally been one of the most cherished values at Williams.

Lack of choice == “autonomy”? This doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as ignorance == strength, but makes about as much sense. To be fair, the next paragraph makes sort of clear that by “autonomy” CUL does not mean “choice of where to live” but “control over the affairs of the place where you do live,” or at least something like that. Note the claim that increased choice itself has “diminished” [read: caused] the decline. I doubt it.

Social life is now significantly less likely to be generated locally, or from the ground up, than was the case under the house system.

D’uh! Is it too much to ask that the CUL fess up and admit that it, and other parts of the College, are the direct cause of this unfortunate state of affairs? Consider:

1. The College now has a Director of Campus Life and 4 Campus Life Coordinators. I have no doubt that they are all fine people dedicated to making Williams students happier. I am eager to believe that the money directed to this new bureaucracy — a bureaucracy largely created by CUL — is well worth it.
2. The College now has 29(!) Housing Coordinators. I am still a little hazing on the role that HCs play. It sure seems like they do all the stuff that house officers (presidents, vice presidents and social chairs) used to do. Does Carter House even have a president anymore? If so, what does she do?
3. The College facilitated the creation of ACE. Again, without being on campus, it is hard to know if ACE is a good thing or a bad thing. ACE certainly seems to make real efforts and Drew Newman ‘04 provides an impressive argument as to its origin, function and worth.

But, whatever else made be said about DCL/CLC/HC/ACE and any other acronyms you’d care to name, they do not increase student autonomy. By defintion, they do things that students used to do for themselves. Back in the day, the students of Carter House decided who would be president, what dues would be levied and what sorts of parties to throw. Maybe they did it poorly. Maybe they did it perfectly. But they did it themselves.

Moreover, this was still the case up until 2001, at least. Perhaps these additions have made students better off. Perhaps not. Perhaps we would have been better off with them during the era of affiliation housing. But there can be no denying that they decreased student autonomy. (And yes, students are heavily involved in many of these acronyms, but each represents a centralization of planning, control and standards.)

And they were, to a large extent, CUL’s idea. CUL has no business blaming free agency for decreased autonomy when free agency co-existed perfectly well with autonomy without DCL/CLC/HC/ACE. If DCL/CLC/HC/ACE have not improved student life in the last 5 years, then CUL should recommend their elimination. (Unlikely, since DCL and one CLC and one HC are on CUL.)

Note that I am not arguing for this! I like Doug Bazuin. I am sure that Matt Boyd does a great job. I think that Karen Untereker ‘05 argues eloquently in favor of anchor housing. But it is intellectually suspect for CUL to blame free agency for a decrease in autonomy that CUL itself has produced.

There was as much autonomy — student control over student life — in Carter House in 2000 as there was in 1985.

This is not because current Williams students are inherently less enterprising or friendly than their predecessors, but rather because the free agent system gives them a smaller stake in their local communities (which have become dormitory buildings filled with individuals and small groups, rather than houses filled with members)

As always, CUL provides no evidence for the claim that the Carter House of 2005 is less of a community than the Carter House of 1985. I have now described, in detail, what life was like in Carter 20 years ago. Does CUL deny the accuracy of that description? Does CUL claim that Carter today is even less of a community to any significant extent?

CUL is too ready to see “problems” in situations that might better be described as “reality” and too eager to believe that its efforts at improvement will actually accomplish its worthwhile goals.

Now that the CUL Report is out, the ball is firmly in Anchors Away’s court. Here is an update to my previous advice, most of which still applies.

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I have been asked by students on both sides of the cluster housing debate to relay my memories of housing life in the 80s. Here goes:

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I like the CUL Report.
I like the CUL Report.
I like the CUL Report.

Maybe if I could just find my ruby slippers and start clicking my heels together, this mantra would come true. Somehow, I doubt it. Screed follows.

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I really want to like the CUL Report on Anchor Housing. And, even if I can’t like it, I want to respect it. And even if I can’t respect it, I want to buy it breakfast in the morning. Yet, having read only the first sentence, I may be in trouble.

What single word best describes that sentence? As opiner on all things Eph, I should avoid knee-jerk emotionalism and snap judgments, but “pathetic” is the only word that comes to mind.

The Committee on Undergraduate Life (CUL) recommends that the College adopt and implement a new system of residential life, to be referred to in this report as The Williams House System.

“The Williams House System”? Let me break out my Newspeak Dictionary and check the capitalization rules! Why not refer to the plan as “The Motherhood and Apple Pie House System” or the “Ephraim Lodging Master Plan”? All three are about as descriptive.

Why couldn’t the CUL have had the intellectual honesty to give their proposal an accurate name, a name that would inform people? Why not use the words “cluster” or “anchor” or whatever?

There is nothing wrong with good rhetoric. The CUL has every right, indeed obligation, to use rhetoric to persuade its audience. But insipid wording serves no purpose. Does CUL believe that the readers of this report find the name “The Williams House System” useful? Does it think that students are more likely to go along with the report if it hides the central organizing principle of the plan behind content-free phrasing?

Good news: The rest of the report can only be better! [You forgot to mock the wordiness of "adopt and implement," as if one could adopt without implementing or implement without adopting. -- ed. I am trying to take the high road here.]

Anchors Away now has a Web page, which we will use to disseminate information and educate the campus about anchor housing and the current state of the CUL’s proposal. See here:

http://wso.williams.edu/orgs/anchors-away

If you would like your name added to the list of those not in favor of anchor housing, or if you have suggestions of ways to improve the page or news items to add, please let me know.

From the link in the previous post:

People are convinced that affiliation by interest is a good thing, so how do you make this “pride of place” happen?

More professional lubrication is required of the process at the outset. We’re going to kick off clusters in a high-profile way. Connections will happen when the bad-mouthers of the anchor system graduate. The competitive idea is an interesting one.

{O’Malley} We’re thinking of maybe having a “cup race” among the six clusters. Each cluster would get a certain amount of points for participating in or hosting different types of activities: IM sports, faculty interaction, parties. The cluster with the most points at the end would win a prize. {Five points for Slytherin. Prof Dudley resumes after this.}

Noah Smith-Drelich ‘07, if creating a system that even its PROPONENTS compare to a fictional fantasy depiction of the British equivalent of a grade 7-12 boarding school isn’t “treating students as children rather than adults,” then what is it? And what would be?

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To unite our cause, I wrote us a fight song. It is to the tune of “Anchors Aweigh,” the U.S. Navy fight song and march.

Rise, good Ephs far and near — don’t stand idly by!
Free agency’s at risk and soon it well may die - ie - ie - ie;
Clusters will take its place, much to our dismay!
So stand up and raise your voice and write with us and fight with us today.

In his first speech to us, Morty once did say
That best was not good enough; so much to our dismay - ay - ay –
He said to the CUL, housing to review;
They thought up this cluster thing which is so bad, it makes us mad and blue.

There’s little time for us, and so much to be done!
Frosh, seniors, jocks, alumni — we need every one - un - un - un;
Write letters, tell your friends, give it your all:
For if anchors come to pass, you’ll lose your choice, forevermore, this fall.

Do try singing it to yourself. I recommend it highly.