Notes From the Desk: A different housing crisis

The lowest number among my potential roommates is about 200 numbers away from Atwater suite status, so we are investigating some off-campus options in anticipation of the administration encouraging more rising seniors to live off campus in the next month. (Where else are all of us going to live?) In our off-campus explorations, my friends and I toured one house, currently occupied by students that highlighted a key housing issue for me.

The yard of the house we toured was strewn with beer cans and trash, and inside, full trash bags were piled in every corner, sticky beer posters were tacked over large holes in the wall and the place was generally splattered with beer and other food-like substances — the walls, the ratty sofa, the busted big screen TV. The landlord told us his current tenants had reported a large amount of “accidental” damage that he was responsible for fixing, and at one point, a tenant’s mother had called him to complain that her son was being exposed to “unlivable conditions.” I agree with the mother, but the condition of the house was not the landlord’s fault, except perhaps in his choice of tenants. The state of this house, and the dorm damage I hear about at the end of every weekend as a member of Atwater’s residential life staff, demonstrates to me a distinct lack of respect for property and an inappropriate sense of entitlement among students when it comes to housing.

We all paid our tuition, and so the College is obligated to house us. But clearly not all junior and senior housing is created equal. The only fair way to deal with that issue would seem to be a random housing draw and an off-campus lottery, and then, of course, some students still get the shaft with bad numbers, but at least everyone has an equal chance at ideal housing. I don’t think all students should get the same chance at good housing, however. The spacious rooms and nice suites on campus — “good housing” by my standards — are not a right; they are a privilege. It is a privilege and extra responsibility to be in command of your own small social space, and it is a privilege some students have demonstrated they have not earned, a responsibility they are clearly not ready for. The students I’m referring to are those who repeatedly cause dorm damage or show a general lack of respect for shared space by leaving cans, bottles, cups, food or even their own excrement behind for someone else to clean up.

If students can be accidentally sorted by commons in the housing number distribution process, I would like to see all of us intentionally sorted by the number and severity of disciplinary measures we have incited. Most of us act like responsible adults most of the time (I like to think), so sorting 1,200 people by the amount of dorm damage we’ve caused would only push a small number of people to the back of the line, but maybe knowledge of what they stand to lose would help keep some of those people in line in the first place. In terms of the off-campus lottery, applicants do have to assert that they have provoked no disciplinary action, but I think commons dean recommendations, or at least sign-offs, should be required as well. If we’re unleashing college students on the Middlebury community, I would want to be extra sure they are responsible and deserving of the greater freedom of living off campus provides. The state of the house I visited tells me at least a few students have made it through the lottery who weren’t ready for that freedom, especially if they get their parents to deal with their landlord.