Posts tagged with dorm.

Clone dorms not a good idea

Bryce Warnes, March 31, 2010 at 3:50 PM

 

Living in residence on campus demands that you share with others in a number of ways. In our house, the walls are thin, so if someone is playing music or has a guest over to their room, everyone gets a piece of the audio. When it was time for residency inspections, we all chipped in to make our home look (more or less) habitable. And our culinary relationship with neighbours has led to the evolution of a communal spice bag full of curry blends that has no permanent home.

 

Prior to moving here, my belongings were my own. If I shared anything, it was with my family - and even then, most of the common resources in the house didn't belong to me. Here, a sort of black market in favours has developed, run by a wide circle of regular visitors and nearby residents to this house. Food, alcohol, tobacco, and other essentials of existence become common property, with the law of reciprocity the only guideline in place.

 

What allows such a co-operative system to develop? Aside from willingness to share and a trust that goodwill shall, eventually, be repaid in kind, what conditions lead to this social cohesion? And, assuming that not every student living on campus participates in similar neighbourhood economies, how can they be nurtured or encouraged?

 

UBC's Alma Mater Society (AMS) suggested earlier this school year that they were looking into the possibility of themed housing on campus. This would see students in some residences on campus sorted according to their program or academic focus. Other universities in North America have implemented similar programs, sometimes with housing themed around ideas like "ecology," "peace," or preparation for Grad school.

 

I have to wonder what shape my year would have taken had I been lodged with Arts or English students instead of the milieu I'm currently among. My friends in residence come from a wide range of backgrounds and compose an equal blend of Science and Arts. And yet - perhaps because we're forced to cohabitate - we've managed to form a posse of individuals that shows no divisions along faculty lines.

 

Obviously this isn't the case with every resident. Every year people end up sharing houses or rooms with people they can't stand, but I doubt this has anything to do with what degrees they're pursuing. In fact, I should think that would be the last thing to affect social harmony. More prevalent issues arise - like who ate all the Eggos, or who dropped hot shisha coals all over the carpet. The matter of whether you spend your study time on differential equations or on the lesser works of Yeats takes a back seat to these more pressing matters.

 

For all the social cohesion program-based housing is going to promote, the AMS might as well divide student residences according to Zodiac signs. I have no idea whether I would get along better with an Aries than a Scorpio or vice versa; not being a great believer in horoscopes, I suspect the point is irrelevant. Subtler aspects of an individual's personality than their star sign - or future profession - play a role here.

 

The qualities that allow people to live harmoniously, and even become friends, cross artificial boundaries set by academia. I've met as many irritating know-it-alls who call themselves poets as call themselves scientists - and I, in my turn, have fulfilled the same role in the eyes of other students. Political scientists can be as rigid and uncompromising in their views of the world as microbiologists.

 

The one benefit I can see in planned student housing is academic, and even then the matter is not clear. Presumably, living with other students of English or Religion would aid me in studying for those topics. And while it's true that I sometimes wish there was another individual in the neighbourhood with whom to hash out the finer points of Jewish dietary law, I could also go without being surrounded by Arts students. Some of the more interesting tidbits I've learned outside the classroom this year have had to do with the formation of RNA, the movement of tectonic plates, and the Large Hadron Collider. And none of them came to me by way of my sonnet-analyzing brethren.

 

At the very least, planned housing would be unfair to Engineering students. In the words of my roommate, "There are no girls in Engineering, man." After all, isn't life on campus about more than networking within your department? It's an experience to be shared with friends, not just classmates. Socializing between faculties is a good thing. Separating them only serves to put up more walls and close more doors - in a very literal sense.

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