Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 16:14:53 EDT To: From: Abbe Cohen Subject: squatting for sophomores: o/res sel minutes Hi, I've been reading the orientation and residence selection minutes as they get posted and I had a question and a comment on the decision about squatting guarantees during the sophomore shuffle vs. getting a heavier weight for staying where you are in the lottery. I realize you all are hosed and would rather spend time writing the unified proposal rather than carefully documenting all of your reasons in the minutes for us concerned alum-types to read, but I'm curious why the switch back to squatting. I'd like to know if you can answer these questions, because I think if you can't give some believable answer to all of them, then saying "we want squatting" is going to be taken as the usual students whining about the status quo where people live in the same place for 4 years. If you've thought through why it's a good thing and won't break the part of the system that depends on their being a lot more mobility (as opposed to a lot more introduced instabilities ;) ) then you're going to need to be able to argue that convincingly. * how can you predict that enough people will move if they can stay in the place where inertia's set in after a year? * What are the contingency plans for making room for the next years' frosh (and for other people who want to move into the dorm) if more people opt to squat than there's room for in a given dorm? * what other things are you doing to encourage moving around in general, and to encourage people to think about moving to a new dorm or an FSILG after freshman year? --Abbe --- Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:50:59 EDT To: From: Abbe Cohen Subject: selecting frosh hey, it suddenly occurs to me that your proposal so far is going along with the idea that the RSSC put in that nobody should ever "choose" frosh in a way that winds up with the possibility of frosh being rejected as a result of the actions of a bunch of upperclassmen (rather than as a result of a lottery.) Or in short, that flushing is bad and evil and horrible no matter how it's performed. Now, from everything I've heard, there is significant psychological difference between being flushed during FSILG rush by an individual who in some way breaks the news "we don't want you here" than being flushed by some black-box system that actually involves input from upperclassmen in some transparent way where you really don't know that it's going on. In the latter case, you simply get your room assignment from a computer (in the case of language houses) or from the room assignment chair (in the case of EC hall rush, for example), and somewhere along the way there was some input from upperclassmen that you didn't actually know about at the time. I've never heard anyone wind up with the impression that they were flushed by a language house or by a hall at EC and permanently psychologically damaged by the experience; they just didn't wind up living there and didn't really question why. So, since your proposal isn't going to the RSSC, who I'm convinced aren't going to budge on this issue, why are you against the selection process as it works in the language houses or EC hall rush, where upperclassmen do have some power to select the frosh who will be living in their small sub-community? Do you guys actually feel that selecting frosh is a bad thing? --Abbe