Last semester, the Campus Council Housing Committee spent more than 35 hours meeting with Dean Burig about the status of Duke's residential community, and we feel more confused now than we were last August. We tried to come up with solutions for what has been dubbed "the housing crunch," a striking disparity between housing for affiliated and unaffiliated students, a migration of seniors to off-campus housing and a quad system that many students feel is disjointed and contrived. We failed because we feel there is no cohesive vision for housing at Duke. If we had to predict what the housing situation would be in three, two or even one year, we would have no answer. Clearly, this is troubling.
Let's take a look at the problem: many students are unaware that last year only 104 beds (not rooms) were available for male unaffiliated upperclassmen (both juniors and seniors). Given that there are 619 upperclassmen unaffiliated males who chose to live on campus, this basically means if you're a male not in a residential fraternity or selective living group (SLG), there's an 83 percent you're going to Central. This estimate is actually pretty low; it doesn't include any junior or senior male living off campus, which is a significant number. Then again, even if you request a Central Campus apartment, you're still subject to the Central Campus housing crunch. There's a possibility you'll end up in Edens, or rooms on West right next to fraternity and SLG sections--the least popular rooms on all campuses for unaffiliated students. While we'd like to think the situation will get better, it will almost certainly get much worse in the coming semesters. With Pratt enrollment increasing by 150 over the next three years, the looming possibility of more fraternity, sorority, or SLG sections, and the increase in Faculty-in-Residence, there is no room for hope on West Campus.
As bad as all this sounds, this is only one aspect of the problem. These are only numbers --the bigger, underlying problem, is a lack of community with our peers at Duke. Now, "community" is a popular buzzword at Duke. Here's what we're talking about: what motivates an unaffiliated student to get to know the people around her when the chances of living near them again are absurdly low? Communities for unaffiliated students are transient. How many people in Kilgo feel they have an intrinsic bond with the people around them just because they're in Kilgo? Students --think of the people in your hall that aren't in your block or SLG: do you know them? Do you talk to them? Are they a significant part of your life, or are they little more than an obligatory "Sup?" Is community a privilege reserved for those in SLGs or an opportunity guaranteed to all Duke students? Our system attempts to foster relationships between residents; we feel too many unaffiliated students would deem the system a failure.
Why is it failing? After spending a semester immersed in the milieu of housing policy, it seems the administration has no cohesive vision for the residential community; the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. The "administration" includes The Board of Trustees, Student Affairs, Residence Life and Housing Services (RLHS), Housing Assignments and any other relevant body or official. These offices provide well-intended, yet uncoordinated, policies that when meshed together result in a chaos that detriments Duke students and counteracts the intentions of these policies. Here's an example: The Board of Trustees in May 2001 mandated the sophomores-on-West and linking combination of policies (a good idea in theory). However, when meshed with existing policies and University conditions (e.g. SLGs on West, increasing Pratt enrollment, increasing Faculty-in-Residence program), it defeats its main purpose: to continue the camaraderie of freshman year throughout the Duke experience. Now that all sophomores are taking up beds on West, juniors are necessarily shifted to Central (see above), killing the continuity that was the intention of the Board of Trustees. All of the policies mentioned above are good ideas, but put together, they work against each other.
Where are we headed? If we were to pose this question to five different University Administrators, we would almost surely get five different answers. This makes Campus Council uneasy. Seniors have experienced so much radical change since their freshman year, and it worries us that we don't know what the residential community will look like when today's freshmen graduate. Will West become only sophomores and SLGs? Will Central Campus become Fraternity row? Will the gateway to prime housing on Campus (wherever that may be in five years) still be through SLGs? Most importantly, what kind of community will Duke students inherit? Will the camaraderie of the freshman dorm continue, in some form, through graduation? Simply building a new Central Campus (another well-intended policy) won't solve all our housing problems. Who will live there and why? Though it helps the numbers crunch, somewhat, how will it help our "community" problems on West? We need a cohesive plan that accommodates the students that live here--us --while the new Central Campus is being planned and built. After 35 hours of meetings on today's residential problems, we found it impossible to delineate any solutions because there is no vision: no one knows what Duke will look like in five years, and as a consequence, we can't solve the temporary problems that we are now experiencing in this transition phase.
And so we write this letter to the senior administration, not demanding, not inquiring, but calling for help. The student body is lost. We don't know where we are in the housing situation, but we know we don't like it. Please, tell us. Tell us where we are headed. And tell us soon.
Chris Kallmeyer
Treasurer, Campus Council
Pasha Majdi
Communications Coordinator and Housing Committee Chair, Campus Council
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