More Matter Check the Commons

Author: Matty Van Meter

There has been quite enough wishful thinking from Old Chapel and from the various Commons offices about the "integral role" which the Commons are supposed to be playing in students' lives. It is pervasive. It is in e-mails, spoken about on tours, evoked defensively by Residential Life staff, featured prominently in the strategic plan and everywhere else. Except in our lives.
In theory, the Commons system is a nice idea: communities within the greater College community, each with its own character and aesthetic, with separate staff members, housing, dining, and social lives. In reality, Middlebury students are not so insular.
While the Commons do some good in terms of providing a support network for students, particularly freshmen, they are so unimportant in the average student's life as to be invisible or worse, nothing but a source for nagging e-mails and invitations to movie nights. For all the grand talk, we live in a community integrated and small enough that artificial bifurcations are hardly what's needed.
It is a fact of life at college for most people that one's friends will increasingly be those within one's major, team, or extracurricular activity, and not the people who happened to live in the same building freshman year. This is particularly true given the increasingly bookish and involved culture of the College, when people are spending more time either alone or participating in their activities, and less time in their dorms.
Students do a fine job creating their own communities of friends. I say, let them live together: the only time when the Commons are not invisible is room draw, which is a fiasco every year, and every year there is a new well-intentioned promise for reform. Suddenly, one's Commons becomes either a burden or a boon; as much as some students love Stewart, Hepburn, and Proctor, the annual exodus from Brainerd is no coincidence (136 freshmen cram into Stewart, yet the 100 beds of "senior" housing include sophomores, juniors, and some empty rooms). Until the housing is completed, using the complex system which we have in place now only creates headaches and heartache.
That said, I am not against the Commons per se, and I certainly would not support dismantling the entire system. But the silent consensus about the Commons is at best ambivalent and removed. For an aspect of Middlebury which is supposed to be so central, this is a bad sign.
So, here is a reality check. There are parts of the system which work fine - I am thinking of how it nicely organizes the SGA and provides support for freshmen - but much of the infrastructure built up around the Commons is either superfluous or inefficient. Either the system needs to be streamlined to accept these realities, or the manner of its implementation needs to be drastically reconsidered. We have chosen this path. Now we need to make it work.
Perhaps the steering committee could consider investigating how students actually use the Commons, instead of planning the future of the College around how we are supposed to be using the Commons. Shaping our culture and direction is not as easy as dividing the campus into five unequal parts. And all of Old Chapel's wishful thinking will not help.