Charles Gray | Building a community

During the past year's financial crisis, we have all certainly learned that years of gains can be wiped out in a matter of days if we are not careful.

The office of College Houses and Academic Services (CHAS), though, is threatening years of gains in order to find an easier way to solve a long-term problem by deciding to temporarily stop admitting freshmen into Rodin College House.

For over 10 years, CHAS and Housing have been working to create a college-house system that focuses on building an intellectual and supportive community. In particular, the integration of freshmen into the high rises has been pivotal in preventing the buildings from indulging in their "isolated" stereotypes.

"We believe firmly in the integration of all four classes," Harrison College House Dean Frank Pellicone said. "And the freshmen are the start of that. They can build on traditions for the entire time that they are here."

For this reason, Harnwell and Harrison have been able to accept 80 or 90 freshmen each year, while Rodin has accepted 40 freshmen. This ensures that a certain proportion of students will always have a long-term, four-year stake in the house.

But this year CHAS has encountered a new set of difficulties: The high rises have become a more-popular option, leading to an increase in applicants.

To further compound the problem, many students believed that this campaign gave them the right to move to a high rise and automatically keep their room for the remaining three years in college. However, the literature states that the policy only applies to their original freshman house.

"If you look at any of our materials, we were really clear that the guarantee only applied to your own college house," CHAS director Leslie Delauter said.

Even if the literature was clear, CHAS did not fix the misunderstanding. When it became clear that sophomores would have to be rejected from the high rises and that they could not backtrack and stay in their old college house, some were worried that upperclassmen would instead turn to off-campus living.

The Radian's opening last year created an easy alternative for students: high-rise style apartments located close to campus, at a moderately higher rate, but with a more forgiving leasing period. And this concerned CHAS.

"We saw more people are moving off campus and were really depressed about it," Delauter said.

Thus the rash decision was made to fix the problem immediately. Rodin's freshmen population would be temporarily removed, opening up those extra beds for sophomores.

But this thought process may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By denying Rodin the freshmen that will have a much greater stake in the house, the idea of a high-rise community could altogether break down. At that point, there would be no reason for students to choose student housing over the Radian.

Unfortunately, many upperclassmen have justified this move as being good for freshmen, who couldn't possibly be happy living with a smaller group of their classmates. Many have even been quoted in this paper saying as such.

But we should really be looking to the freshmen who are staying in the high rises to see if they view the situation as detrimental to their social development.

"I didn't feel isolated at all, because during NSO the entire freshmen community is mixed together, and that's when you make your friends across campus," College freshman and Rodin resident Turja Chakrabarti said. "We formed a great, close-knit community in the freshman hall."

We, as rising and current upperclassmen, need to take the responsibility and understand what might be good for us is not necessarily good for college housing in general. There are other possible solutions: Encouraging more sophomores to stay in the Quad, for instance, would decrease the bottleneck of students vying for a high-rise apartment.

There is no doubt that each high rise needs to have a certain number of freshmen beds to maintain a group of core students who will be house leaders. Otherwise, the college housing system may end up like the markets - the hard work of the last 10 years could disintegrate, and future students will be left to pick up the pieces.

Charles Gray is a Wharton freshman from La Crescenta, Calif. The Gray Area appears on alternating Tuesdays. His email address is gray@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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