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→History: restored (rephrased, more NPOV-like) statement that initial blog commentary was negative
In 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 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.