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Changes
→History: Added adoption of four-cluster model
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]] asserted 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 [[Fay]] 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 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 President Schapiro and Dean Roseman announcing that this four-cluster plan will be adopted in fall 2006.
==Student Opinion==