949
edits
| Willipedia is now back online as of 5/5/2019 |
| It has been several years since Willipedia closed. Please help get it updated! |
| Go to the Willipedia 2.0 Project to learn more. |
Changes
edits all around. super linkified houses. removed link to Currier Cluster Pick . . . I'd like to see it, but can't think of a place it'd belong
[[Category:History]][[Category:Student Housing]]
''Some of the following content is considered, by some, to not have a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view neutral point of view]. Users who find a bias they believe is wrong or unhelpful are encouraged to excise unhelpful bias for fact, or add their own counterbalancing point of view in the appropriate places.''
* '''Ability to live with friends, and have options within the system'''
There are ideas for a "House Cup" and House IM teams, cluster-associated faculty and informal faculty dinnersevents with them, designated bulletin boards in the [[new Baxter]], and cluster outings, but plans are not definite yet. Some students (and CUL members) have joked about whether the [http://wso.williams.edu/discuss/comments.php?DiscussionID=140 clusters will be named after the houses in the Harry Potter books].
The anchor houses and their associated dorms are:
* '''[[Currier cluster|Currier]]''': [[Fitch]], [[Prospect]], [[East]], Fayerweather}[[Currier Cluster PickFayerweather]]* '''[[Doddcluster|Dodd]]''': [[Hubbell]], [[GoodrichHouse]], [[Parsons]], [[Sewall]], [[Tyler]], [[Tyler Annex]], [[Thompson]], [[Lehman]]* '''[[Spencercluster|Spencer]]''': [[Morgan]], [[West]], [[Brooks]], [[Bryant]], [[Mark Hopkins]]* '''[[Woodcluster|Wood]]''': [[Perry]], [[Garfield]], [[Agard]], [[Gladden]], [[Carter]]
The houses [[Chadbourne]], [[Doughty]], [[Lambert]], [[Milham]], [[Poker Flats]], [[Rectory]], [[Susie Hopkins]], and [[Woodbridge ]] will remain (or become) [[co-ops]].
[[Dodd Annex ]] will become Econ. Economics Faculty Offices.
For the CUL's complete description of anchor housing, see the [http://www.williams.edu/resources/committees/cul/reports/2005.pdf full proposal]. It is fairly detailed and includes a history of housing at Williams, though it perpetuates the misconception that the change from House Affiliation to [[free agency|Free Agency ]] was driven by the administration and was "accidental." In fact, students were freely swapping rooms well before the official switch to Free Agency, thus a de facto free agency system existed at the end of the House Affiliation period.
==History==
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 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. There are a number of reasons given for this change: 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 convince 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.
In [[winter study|Winter Study ]] 2004, 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]]. Each Freshman [[entry]] would be associated with a cluster, and rising sophomores would join the cluster of their entry. In the [http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6308 second article] breaking the story, [[Morton Owen Schapiro|Morty]] was quoted as saying, "It’s in the interests of the students, ultimately. The challenge is to explain why."
Shortly thereafter, commentary surfaced in the ''Record'', saturated [[WSO Blogs]], and continued for some time after the initial announcement. Most of the commentary from students was very critical of the proposed change. 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. Additionally, the CUL determined that larger clusters would be more conducive to forming 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 name "Williams House System" in late February 2005, and recieved the [[Administration|Administration's]] approval. The CUL declared 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. Asserting that the decision to move to the new system itself ought still to be at issue, students in [[Anchors Away]] argued that the administration was ignoring dissenting students' opinion.
In April 2005, College Council submitted a [http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=6706 letter of opposition] to clusters to the adminsitration. The letter makes explicit the point that anchor housing cannot be successful without support from the students.
A suggestion by Dean [[Nancy Roseman]] took both the CUL and student body by surprise in December 2005. Dean Roseman believed that there might not be enough dedicated students to fill the number of leadership positions needed in a five-cluster system. The new idea reduced the number of clusters to four and changed the distribution of dorms within clusters. In an effort to make each cluster's dorm space more equitable, the new plan turned [[Morgan]], [[Lehman]], [[East]], and [[Fayerweather]] into upper-class (likely sophomore) housing, and moved the freshman entries previously located in those dorms to [[Mission Park]]. The former first-year dorms would recieve renovations to bolster the number of singles and availability of [[common room|common space]]. In general, students were encouraged by the reduction in number of clusters, but opinion on the relocation of freshmen was mixed. When students returned from [[Dead Week]] 2006, they recieved letters signed by [[Morton Owen Schapiro|President Schapiro ]] and Dean Roseman announcing that this four-cluster plan would be adopted in fall 2006, and students would enter it through the Spring 2006 [[room draw]].
== Etymology ==
