News
Anderson to be a substance-free dorm for the 2016-17 year
By Dillon Kelly ’18
April 28, 2016
Tags news
Housing has been a contentious issue since the option to live off-campus was eliminated last year. There are a few choices that students are faced with when deciding about housing such as choosing substance-free living, entering the blocking lottery for a suite, or more generally, picking on which side of campus to reside.
Currently there are four substance-free residence halls for upperclassmen (Root, Kirkland, Rogers and Anderson Road), leaving 17 buildings that are not substance-free for the remaining students.
“It is difficult to determine if students are signing up for the substance-free lottery because they genuinely have an interest in living a substance-free lifestyle or if they just are looking to avoid the general lottery and have housing in a specific location,” Assistant Director of Residential Life Ashley Place said. “Unfortunately, there is no way for us to determine what motivates people to sign up for specific lotteries, nor would we want to get in the business of asking. I will say that it seems like an increasing percentage of the rising sophomore class tends to sign up for the substance-free lottery, creating a tough situation when students who genuinely want it aren’t able to get it when we run out of spaces.
Root, Kirkland, and more recently Rogers have been substance-free for sometime, while Anderson is set to become substance-free next year.
Place commented that the reason for this change has to do with the need for more space for the Counseling Center. She stated, “We normally have 100 College Hill Road online as substance-free but we agreed to take it offline this year to allow the Counseling Center to use the space. They are gaining a new staff member and will not have enough space in their old office. Unfortunately, their new building won’t be ready for a while so the plan is for the Counseling Center to occupy 100 College Hill Road for the next two academic years.”
Place went on to explain that the school then hopes to take Anderson offline completely and return it to faculty housing as it was originally intended to be. This change to sub-free was made because both 100 College Hill Road and Anderson have 11 beds, and can maintain the number of substance-free beds the school offer for upperclassmen.
Anderson was also never intended by the school to accommodate student living. The house was made into student housing a couple of years ago when the school had an unusually large number of students on campus, and space was necessary. Place states, “Now that we’re back to manageable numbers, we would ideally not have [Anderson] be student housing at all because of the condition and location.”
Some students are not pleased with the fact that dorms with apartment style living are being either taken away or are becoming more limited and harder to acquire in the housing lottery.
Julia Summers ’18 represented this sentiment, stating “There is definitely a lack of housing options on campus for upperclassmen students interested in houses or apartment-style living. The school tried to address it with Morris House, but then took away more houses such as Anderson. We need more options on campus for students to have the ability to learn what it’s like to live on their own, not in a dorm building.”
This year’s lottery was complicated by a gender-blocking error. “Unfortunately one of our volunteer student workers made an error in counting the male-to-female ratio in South and an announcement was made during the Junior class that South was closed to men. We go through and double check everything between lotteries and caught the error at that time,” Place said. “We corrected it immediately by opening the building up to men when the sophomore class lottery began because there was no way for us to go back and fix it for the junior class. We are sincerely sorry for the impact this error may have had for men in the rising junior class who were hoping to choose South. I will be making adjustments to the lottery next year to make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen again.”