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Anchor housing was first proposed by the 1999-2000 [[Committee on Undergraduate Life]] (CUL) under the leadership of Professor Charles Dew, a Williams alum from the time when College housing was based around fraternities. The proposed system was a bit different back then, and was finally abandoned by the 2002 CUL in favor of making discrete changes to room draw procedures: decreasing the size of pick groups from 7 to 4, implementing a blind room draw, and instituting gender caps on individual houses. The reason for this change varies depending on who you ask: 2005 CUL members claimed that the Committee of 2000 wanted to give their changes time to work, and allow time to see how the new [[House Coordinator]] system was faring; students who were on campus in 1999-2000 suggest that the student body protested the idea of anchor housing strongly enough to get the CUL to back down; and some student members of the 2000 CUL claim that it was their objections to anchor housing that kept the system from being implemented in spring 2003.
Though students thought that anchor housing had disappeared, it turned up again, suddenly, in Winter Study 2004, when news was leaked to the Williams ''[http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6225|Record]'' that the 2004-2005 CUL (led by Professor Will Dudley, an alum from the days when students were affiliated with one house throughout their upperclass years) was going to propose the system again. The proposed system involved creating six clusters, with houses in each cluster scattered across campus but united by a centrally located [[anchor house]]. Which freshman [[Entry]] a student belongs to determines which cluster the student would be assigned to as a rising sophomore. In the [http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6308|second article] breaking the story, [[Morty]] was quoted as saying, "It’s in the interests of the students, ultimately. The challenge is to explain why."
The immediate student reaction was strong opposition. Commentary saturated the ''Record'' and [[WSO blogs]] for some time after the initial announcement. A group of students dedicated to preventing the implementation of anchor housing and maintaining free agency housing formed the group [[Anchors Away]]. These students conducted surveys of students (in one case, they collected written opinions from almost 200 Williams students opposed to anchor housing), wrote letters to the CUL, ''Record'', and [[Trustees]], and compiled documents detailing student objections to the anchor housing proposal. Their efforts culminated in a failed campaign for the [[College Council]] co-presidency by two of their founding members.
In January 2005, the Committee on Undergraduate Life made a series of substiantial changes to the anchor housing proposal. Entries were detatched from clusters in favor of randomly assigning rising sophomores. This was generally regarded as an improvement by students. Additionally, the CUL determined that larger clusters would be more conducive to forming so-called genuine communities and decreased the number of clusters to five. The cluster boundaries were also redrawn to be geographically localized; each cluster, instead of comprising houses from all areas of campus, would consist of nearby houses. Also, the CUL began to refer to the new housing proposal by the name ''cluster housing'' instead of ''anchor housing'', because they felt that "anchor housing" gave too much of an impression that students would be stuck to something in their residential lives. Finally, the date of implementation was pushed back from fall 2005 to fall 2006. This move was [http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6449|highly regarded] by the student body.
The CUL finally [http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6484|submitted] its proposal to the administration under the vague name "Williams House System" in late February 2005, and recieved the promised rubber-stamp approval. Students in Anchors Away worried that the administration was ignoring their opinion, but the CUL determined that its mission in the 2005-2006 academic year would consist solely of determining how exactly the transition from free agency to anchor housing would be carried out. This is what they are deliberating now.
