It's that time of year again. Friendships will be broken, most sophomores will be condemned to doubles or the waitlist and ResLife will continue to refuse to answer the question, "What are my chances of...?" You can either flee the country like my friend Mara, who claims she's "going abroad to avoid the lottery," or face the housing crunch on College Hill. However you decide to handle it this year, Brown needs to start looking to the future. I've got a few suggestions, both short-term and long-term propositions to help improve undergraduate campus life.
What's wrong? There are too many students living on campus at Brown. Brown simply does not have the facilities to support everyone. To make up for this, students get shoved in converted lounges and common rooms are converted into bedrooms. Off-campus permission is a pain, in a large part because different students get granted permission at different times, making it difficult for students to plan to live off-campus together. This results in too many kids living on campus. Suites in New Dorm are being broken up to fit Community Assistants. Finally, Grad Center is a huge waste of space. I mean, it's kind of cool, but literally is not spatially efficient.
Solution one: Stop letting so many people into our school! We like it small, but you keep letting more people in! Housing at Brown is already well below the standards of our peer institutions. Even Cornell and Columbia have first-year single options. I won't talk about the hardwood-floor palaces at Harvard. But at Brown, it is very difficult for a lot of our sophomores to get singles outside of quiet or substance free dorms, while other schools have them for first-year. Instead of overcrowding Brown, stuffing four transfers in a lounge and doing away with our beloved common rooms (while at least one Wriston single sits unoccupied at times of the year,) how about we get on the ball with admissions? Early Decision is great. Let's let more students in then. They want to be at Brown more than any other school. This will increase the percentage of kids accepted that decide to come, will encourage more early applicants and will lead to a better ability to predict the exact size of our incoming class. Then we can decrease the number of kids accepted through regular decision. This will drive our percentage admitted down. At the very least, we have to start cutting back the number of undergrads admitted here to the amount we can comfortably house.
Solution two: Do away with off-campus permission. If we can find a house, what does the University really care? Why does ResLife have to insist on stuffing more students into Brown housing than Brown can hold? If through some crazy mass exodus, Brown can't fill its dorms, we can either make all sophomores stay on campus or keep our current admissions numbers. I vote to give all juniors and seniors off-campus permission, but if they select something in a lottery, then they are required to stay on campus.
Solution three: Select Community Assistants from among the students already living in the dorms. While it is understandable that the University wants a student living in each dorm as a resource, I feel that for older students, importing a "specially trained" student into the dorm at the expense of breaking apart suite communities of friends will only hurt the dorm dynamic. And Brown, if you are going to insist on taking away these singles for CAs, then why don't you at least offer the remaining rooms as suites of smaller size? Most kids at Brown want to live near friends. That's why we have group lotteries. A hall with 20 random singles/doubles isn't conducive to this. Adding a couple five, six or seven-person suites without common rooms is. The current plan will force upper-class groups to split up and may land a few sophomore groups in doubles spread throughout a dorm of mostly juniors and seniors.
Solution four: Knock down Grad Center and build a new one! I know it might involve raising a large amount of money, but with so much being raised for "academic enrichment," I am sure that the University could find a donor who wants to improve the lives of students. A "New Grad Center" that uses the land efficiently to create a living space for more students with more amenities, such as more suites with bigger singles, common rooms, thick walls and hallways to socialize between suites would probably be the best way to alleviate housing strains.
I really love Brown, but I don't think there is a student here who can't find a problem with the housing system. The University might need to reduce the number of people we accept, let students migrate off campus more easily, put a hold on unnecessarily renovating the Sci-Li to rebuild Grad Center or pick CAs from within dorms. My only hope is that Brown takes action soon!
Trevor Griffen '07 lives in a storage closet in Keeney.
