For students and alumni who identify with the Odd Quad, the experience of watching the debate over the anchor housing system unfold has been one of disappointed expectation, turning to fear for the upcoming years. In rhetoric and writing by members of the CUL that preceded their current report, the Odd Quad culture was neither attacked nor praised, but typically left entirely unmentioned. Reading the current report, one familiar with its culture expects a mention of the Odd Quad at many places where the lessons of its long existence are pertinent, yet while a detailed discussion of the Odd Quad's past, present, and future are surely needed, the current report contains not even a mention. Throughout the anchor housing debate, the Odd Quad has been the elephant in the room that the CUL seems to have tried to ignore.
The culture of the Odd Quad is and has been an achievement of many of the goals of the CUL's current plan, and an exception to the states of campus life that have motivated their recommendations. The Odd Quad is a corner of campus that plays a prominent role in the life of hundreds of students today, and thousands over the years of its evolving existence; yet the CUL proposal would mean its certain death. To be sure that this cost to the community is outweighed by the benefits, to reach the kind of understanding of Williams residential life that is necessary to craft good policy, it is imperative to understand this culture, unique to Williams, that so many students have built and tended to for decades.
This section of our report is not an attempt at this understanding, which cannot be properly achieved in this space, but it is a survey of the aspects of the Odd Quad that seem to most offer guidance to the project of restructuring residential life at Williams, and questions for the CUL's current report.
The Odd Quad is an exception to nearly all of the CUL's ``findings'' regarding residential life at Williams today: prevalence of fragmentation, lack of common investment, lack of benign traditions. While one may debate the extent to which the free agency system has led to these problems, it is indisputable that the residents of the Odd Quad have not felt these problems, or felt them much less, under free agency. They have solved or avoided the problems on their own, in their own way. Laurie Brink '05 eloquently describes how the Odd Quad has helped students who are not like ``most'' of their peers.
That's it, in a nutshell. Entries are successful for ``most students.'' This plan, if it is successful for anyone, would at best only be successful for ``most students.''
So what about the rest of us?
I never felt even slightly supported by my entry. I didn't drink or dress in my undies for Queer Bash or care about the World Series, and they did, and so our paths diverged. After a while I stopped showing up for entry snacks at all, because I preferred to hang out with the many friends I had made outside of my entry ...who almost all, oddly enough, seemed to live in one quad. Yep, you know which one. I doubt I would have made a third of the friends I did freshman year if Currier, Fitch, and Prospect had been more ``diverse,'' which in your terminology seems to mean ``more totally unrelated (and superficially different).'' That's not to say that I didn't make ethnically, religiously, sexually, culturally, politically, economically diverse friends. I certainly did. But I didn't make very geographically diverse friends, because all the people with interests like mine congregated in the buildings they knew were their safe spaces, where it was okay to say, ``Let's play a board game!'' and okay to put on spontaneous musical productions, and okay to go home at 3 AM Sunday morning without a drop of alcohol in you. The Odd Quad is a refuge for a lot of people who find ACE parties irritating and don't make friends in their entries -- not because their entries were bad, but simply because they didn't fit there. This plan takes that refuge away.
A year and a half ago I had the pleasure of meeting a pair of freshman girls who showed up to an Odd Quad gathering advertised on a listserver. Both of them seemed shy at first, but became more talkative and cheerful as the evening progressed. Both said they didn't hang out with their entries, and both said that they were immensely glad they had come. I believe they both live in the Odd Quad now. Where would they have found a place without it?
You must know they never would have found their places. You must have encountered enough freaks, geeks, nerds, oddballs, and misfits to know that we won't come to the keg parties, whether ACE throws them or anchor houses do. And without the Odd Quad, we won't have any alternative place to meet. That's awfully hard on those of us who aren't ``most.''
Does the CUL worry that students depend too much on centralized social planning under free agency? Is there a fear that free agency makes it hard for traditions to arise and persist? On the contrary, the Odd Quad is a culture in which social tradition and interaction among the diverse many has thrived under free agency, a culture in which the needs for tradition and good social interaction have been successfully united and solved. The Odd Quad generates and maintains traditions that both define and stabilize its culture, and facilitate interaction among its hundreds of members.
Students of the Quad understand that they share a commonality, even if they cannot easily describe what that commonality consists in. Bop-swording (mock fencing with padded weapons) and LARPs (live action role-plays) were once a major Odd Quad activity, but many never partook and still considered themselves, and were in turn considered, to be members of the Odd Quad. Over the years, new and ingenious events take their places as cherished traditions of the Quad, such as the Driscoll Deviations, in which members of the Odd Quad dress according to a certain theme and eat (and perform) in Driscoll, or silly movie nights, in which students advertise their suite to the Odd Quad as a place to come and watch a movie each week. Often different suites rival each other with selections, or establish themselves on different nights, and always the invitation goes to hundreds of people, most of whom the suite residents have never met. This is the sort of social event style and tradition that the CUL wants to create using random affiliation and clusters, but which the Odd Quad has achieved for decades through self-chosen association. A sophomore commented:
I am concerned that anchor housing will be very detrimental for small groups of people with similar interests (i.e. not mainstream ones). Currently many people like this can congregate in the Odd Quad, but this group would be fragmented under the anchor system, making it more difficult for non-mainstream people to find people with whom they are comfortable. I believe this problem is aggravated by the idea that clusters would throw lots of parties, but what about people who don't like to party? It'll be much more difficult to avoid it. For a plan that is nominally about encouraging diversity and a better social scene, it is distressing that anchor housing will make social interactions for people with unusual interests much more difficult or wipe them out.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of the Odd Quad has been its breadth across campus and graduation classes. Many student members of the Odd Quad do not actually live in the quad, but take the walk there for visits and events, and treat it as a home away from home. Odd Quad alums who return to visit often return as guests of the Quad, socializing with and staying with students whom they may never have met, but whom they know through listservers or participation in traditions. Old traditions die and evolve and new arise over time, yet the Odd Quad remains a recognizable and stable enough entity that it has been able to serve as a dependable home across distance and time - and it is entirely maintained by students who choose to affiliate. Ebonie Little '07 wrote:
I'm not here to knock the entry system -- I met a bunch of very fun and friendly people in my entry last year. I chose to live here because while I really love you guys over in Dennett, I knew I had a group of friends with interests and attitudes that I can really identify with. I'm socially awkward, but not as traumatized as most, and I don't feel the need to crawl into a lair of social isolation as other Odd Quadders confess they often do. But I took the option of living here in a great place of interesting people who aren't going to call something ``sketchy'' at the first sign of non-conformity. On both ends of the spectrum, we have a Gladden and we have an Odd Quad who are happy with where they are, and no social engineering on the part of the CUL will benefit either side. At worst, the minority culture will just be completely wiped out.
Though the particulars certainly cannot be applied to all students, the richness of social interaction and tradition in the Odd Quad is something that the CUL, and all of us, dream of achieving for all of campus, but the Odd Quad poses strong questions to the conclusions and assumptions of the CUL's proposed method of doing this. We may dismiss the Odd Quad an exception to the rule of campus life, but if we do, we dismiss an exception thousands of students in size, and decades old.
If we cherish what the Odd Quad has achieved, as the CUL does, its existence is an opportunity for our goal of improving life at Williams. Its culture should be studied and discussed extensively in the CUL report, not ignored. Specifically, we need to know:
Again, our goal is not to prejudge what the CUL might discover. We just want them to look.