Dean of The College William Scott Green stated at the Freshman Advisory Committee meeting yesterday that a decision on moving freshman housing from the Residential Quad to Susan B. Anthony, Gilbert and Hoeing Halls should be reached within a week.
It is uncertain exactly how the decision will be made, but Green said that he needed to talk with President Thomas Jackson, Dean of Faculty Thomas LeBlanc and “touch all the bases” with administration and faculty first before issuing an official announcement from the college. The decision has to be reached soon so it could be settled by room draw.
Much of yesterday’s meeting centered around arguments that had been brought up in previous weeks, but an effort was made to see if a general consensus existed among the Committee.
The main points of the opposition to the move included fears that splitting the freshman class into two locations would divide the class, and that with only a year of trial the current plan has not been allowed to come to fruition.
The proponents of the move counter the allegation of class division with the belief that there is hall and floor unity among the current freshman class, but little unity among freshman who live in different buildings along the quad.
Athletic Director George Vander Zwaag also explained that the current method of freshman housing results in de facto sophomore housing in Sue B., and this was not the intention of the original Freshman Housing plan. “I think that if we don’t make the change we don’t accomplish the initial goals of our program,” Vander Zwaag said.
If the move to Sue B. was enacted, Residential Life has come up with plans to add upperclassmen to each floor in Sue B. Plans include adding more D’Lions to each floor or creating a new position that would place upperclassmen who would have a “positive impact” on freshman in singles.
Professor of Earth and Earth Sciences Ariel Anbar put forth the concept of a “dealbreaker” ? anything
that would make the proposed change unworkable. He stated that in the current system there is one, and that is the two years of class housing.
Green echoed Anbar’s comments saying, “We have to make decisions on the basis of facts, not hopes and fears,” and the facts that have been uncovered about the proposed move have allayed most of the fears over the change. “We’ve learned a lot from Freshman Housing … but there’s more than freshman there’s a whole college campus ? four years to think about.”
DeSantis can be reached at kdesantis@campustimes.org.
