With the closing of Central Campus and opening of The Hollows and a refurbished Craven, where will you be living next year?
Joe Gonzalez, assistant vice president of student affairs and dean for residential life, provided The Chronicle with information about housing changes for the 2019-2020 school year.
The groups living in The Hollows next year will be Alpha Delta Pi, Chi Omega, Kappa Alpha Theta, Mundi, Mt. Olympus, Narnia, Rabbit Hole, Skyler, Tortuga and Zeta Tau Alpha.
The new groups moving to 300 Swift next school year will be Delta Gamma, Delta Kappa Epsilon, JAM!, Multicultural Greek Council, Pi Beta Phi, Pi Kappa Phi, Sierra and Sigma Nu. Although Sierra will be the only independent house in 300 Swift, they will constitute about half of all the students living in the apartment complex.
Alpha Phi and Delta Sigma Phi will be moving to Edens. Sigma Phi Epsilon will be moving to Keohane. Kappa Alpha Order, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Psi Upsilon, The Cube and Ubuntu will be moving to Craven. Banham will remain in Edens.
All of the groups that are relocated to 300 Swift due to Craven renovations will return to Craven, including Alpha Tau Omega, Lumos, Mirecourt, Powerhouse, Sherwood, Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Chi.
Junior Ryan Dant, president of Sigma Phi Epsilon, wrote in an email that Central will always have a place in their hearts, but they are excited to be on West Campus with the rest of the Duke community. Though they will be the only Greek organization in Keohane, he noted they are looking forward to using the space and like the location.
“We feel like the process worked very well,” Gonzalez said. “The houses that participated in the process seemed to feel like it was very fair and transparent about how it was operating and where they would end up, and I think we ended up with the distribution we were looking for.”
Gonzalez explained that there were a few basic principles guiding this housing process. He said they were committed to making sure each of the eligible Central houses would have a house on West, limiting the disruption to the existing houses on West, setting up West for the housing link program and making sure each of the selective living groups have a new house with a similar number of beds.
They wanted The Hollows to have at least six independent houses out of the nine total houses, Gonzalez said.
Two of the houses in The Hollows contain selective living groups. Thus, there are nine total houses in The Hollows, with 11 living groups.
Gonzalez explained that they divided the different selective living groups into three groups based on size: Small is fewer than 28 beds, medium is 28 to 40 beds, and large is greater than 40 beds. They then divided the available houses into those three categories to determine where each group would fit.
The houses that are moving were allowed the opportunity to choose which house they wanted to move to given their options, Gonzalez said. The order of selection was determined by how well the selective living groups met expectations, such as filling all the beds and meeting class distribution requirements. The groups that performed the best chose first. The order of selection for independent houses were randomly generated.
“We were trying to do it as fair as possible, so that’s how we ended up using expectation performance to determine the selection order for the selective living groups,” Gonzalez said. “We thought that was a neutral way of choosing who would select first.”
Gonzalez said he has not received any pushback to the changes from the students so far.
However, Dant explained that the metrics they used to decide selection order were too quantitative and did not take into account citizenship on campus.
When Gonzalez was asked about why class-distribution requirements were being taken into account at an Interfraternity Council meeting, Dant wrote in an email that "he gave a pretty weak answer about how they don’t think communities should be missing seniors, but that is not quite how Greek communities at Duke tend to operate."
He also noted that they experienced large delays in communication and were given the selection order without knowing how they performed in the metrics.
Senior Alexis Salcedo, president of Zeta Tau Alpha, said that the selection process was communicated to them very clearly. They were provided with the selection ranking order and detailed information about each housing option, such as number of bedrooms and facilities, she explained.
Salcedo consulted with her sorority before deciding which house to live in next year.
"The girls who would be living there seem very excited about moving and having access to the brand new building," Salcedo wrote in an email. "I think it is a great opportunity given that there have been many issues with Central in the past, and now with a brand new building, the living experience will be much improved."
Craven is the last house that needs to renovated, so Gonzalez said they are hoping to build another dorm or two in order to house those at 300 Swift on West Campus.
“I think having almost everyone on West will be a very positive thing for the student community and have an impact on campus in a very positive way” Gonzalez said.
Correction: This article was updated Thursday morning to reflect that Banham will remain in Edens.
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