Assumptions

• There shall be no theme or special interest housing.

• The first year entry system with Junior Advisers works well and should be left alone. First years should be engineered into entries that are as diverse as the admissions office can make them.

• Co-op housing for seniors works well and should be expanded. There is something magical about the opportunity to live communally with close friends during senior year. It is a good thing that Williams has exposed it students to a wide diversity of Ephs in their first three years. Senior year is the time to enhance and solidify the very special bonds that, if students are lucky, will last a lifetime. Co-ops do that.

• Senior-only housing is special and should be encouraged and facilitated, even for those who do not want to live as co-ops. All the good aspects of co-ops apply here as well, but there is no reason to prevent those who want to eat in the dining hall from enjoying an intimate housing experience with close friends during senior year. Moreover, the size of most of the houses with premium senior rooms -- West (40+), Brooks (15+), Wood (25+), Perry (25+), Garfield (30+) -- make them hard to fill with just one ``type'' of student. Senior-only housing outside of co-ops is unlikely to lead to theme housing, much less houses whose character carries over from year to year.

• During sophomore and junior year, it is good to live with both close friends in your suite and Ephs different from and/or unknown to you in your house. The time for the extreme social engineering of first year is over, but the importance of being exposed to a diverse group of students remains. It is best that the serendipitous relationships that will arise from these interactions have as many years as possible to develop and deepen.

• It is hard to know ahead of time who your friends will be or where your most meaningful Eph connections will occur. Your closest relationships may well be with people who came to Williams from very different backgrounds. In fact, the more different you are from your fellow Eph, the more likely you both are to get something out of the relationship. But those relationships take time to develop and flower.

• The flexibility and possibilities of junior year should be retained. It is a good thing that more than 50% of juniors do something different -- from being a JA to Williams-in-Oxford -- that takes them away from upperclass housing.

• In the short term, the physical infrastructure of Williams must be taken as a given. No major student construction projects are on the horizon. None are needed. To the extent that there is money for housing, it should be spent on increasing the number of senior co-ops and decreasing the number of doubles.

• The spaces on campus -- Dodd, Spencer, Currier and so on -- capable of supporting large parties are held in common for all students. The College plans on holding a certain number of parties in those spaces each year, even if the residents of those houses are not a part of the party. Students who do not like living in such houses should not pick into them.

• No housing system is perfect. There will always be students who are dissatisfied. But misery should be decreased whenever possible. A housing system in which 30% are very happy and 3% are miserable is much better than a system in which the breakdown is 50% to 10%.

• Student choice in housing is a good thing. It may not be the most important thing but, as long as the other goals of housing policy are met, it is best to let students choose where to live.

If one takes these assumptions as given, then the current free agent system works quite nicely. In fact, one of the reasons that students are so enamored with the status quo is that they are broadly in agreement with the assumptions above and are smart enough to realize that, within the universe of possible housing systems, the College's current policy of a campus-wide lottery system works remarkably well.