Exile and Excuses: The College Simply Unconcerned About Housing Students

Voices cry out in the wilderness — belonging to students without a place to call home in the very college that exiled them for a year and a half. With the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, many students were excited to return to campus for the fall term. However, with limited study-abroad opportunities, constrained D-Plans as a result of a remote school year, and a general eagerness from students wanting to enjoy campus while they still can, the term may be the most densely populated yet. Combine this with an extremely high yield on students offered a spot in the Class of 2025 due to mismanagement by the Office of Admissions, and you have a college wildly unprepared for the influx. It thus is not surprising that The College announced in June that fall housing “demand has exceeded our capacity.” 

Writing off the shortage under the pretense that this problem simply arose because of excessive demand, The College attempted to erase the larger issue at hand: that it has done nothing about a looming housing supply crisis, which has been discussed but ignored for years leading up to now. Let us not forget the hidden intention of the “Sophomore Summer” requirement designed to offload housing demand — a product of President Kemeny’s 1972 announcement to make The College co-ed without a solution to increase underlying residence accommodations. History often repeats itself. Once again, The College deploys excuses and workarounds to substitute for material change. 

Flawed 2018 plans to develop an undergraduate housing complex fell through; construction never even began and submissions to the Town were never made. With a seemingly perfect opportunity to address the shortage over the course of the pandemic, The College twiddled its thumbs, instead focusing funds on a graduate housing complex and academic buildings. First, these developments are not mutually exclusive with construction and renovation of undergraduate residence halls. The Onion, Choates, tennis courts, and other underutilized spaces all offer potential locations for new dorms. Second, considering its deployment of millions of dollars into various construction projects, it seems that this is a priorities issue, not a budget constraint. Novel plans are underway to develop an undergraduate resident hall by the fall of 2023 accompanied by a board decision to allocate 1.65 million dollars and a portion of the Infrastructure Renewal Fund to “renewed campus housing,” but there are no guarantees in place. Students are tired of broken promises that push legitimate concerns to some distant future. 

The shortage of undergraduate housing places severe burdens on students. Many have been scrambling to find off-campus accommodations in the Upper Valley. With real estate prices at an all time high, rent will surely be devastating for students who relied on the subsidized housing and utilities The College provides. With stringent town residency requirements, there is limited availability in Hanover, causing further problems for students who lack a car or live too far away from New Hampshire for it to be feasible to bring one. If students can’t find housing off-campus, they simply can’t take classes, altering their D-Plan due to reasons outside of their control. This presents a significant issue for students in the Class of 2023, most of whom only have one available off-term left reserved for their junior summer when many take on an internship that potentially defines their career path. This catch-22 situation, wherein students are neither able to attend the fall term due to housing constraints nor able to forgo taking the 2022 summer term off due to professional obligations, has yet to be addressed by The College. The Class of 2022 is facing a related predicament in that they must attend their senior fall, winter, and spring terms. It is also important not to forget mental health, especially after a year of lock-downs, quarantine, and isolation from friends and community. Some students haven’t been on campus for a year and a half; others are transfers who have no knowledge of what on-campus life is like. This general sense of seclusion will only be perpetuated by the fall housing exile. 

Fulfilling the role that The College’s bloated bureaucracy should be, Student Assembly released a Fall Housing Open Letter to offer solutions that avoided simply exiling students from their community. They proposed two very feasible options: temporarily transforming local hotels, including the Hanover Inn, into undergraduate housing and providing housing stipends to ease the financial burden of living off-campus if the former option is limited. These solutions would provide The College ample time to construct new housing while accommodating current students. Unsurprisingly, the letter fell upon deaf ears. Instead, The College has opted to implement a fall housing “lottery” system in which students can waive their right to housing for a chance at $5,000 in compensation. This plan creates problematic incentives in that, realistically, The College is waving a carrot in front of low-income students who may feel obligated to accept the lottery at the cost of their own position on campus; it doesn’t appear that the lottery provides much of an incentive for high-income students who don’t need to sacrifice their well being for material necessity. As if students are passengers on an overbooked flight, The College’s solution is to burn cash to facilitate the exile. The College has also worked to convert common spaces and residence basements and increase the occupancy of already tightly packed rooms — as if the Choates isn’t an obscene daily reminder of attempts to address the supply shortage through shoddy construction projects. 

At the end of July, 93 undergraduates remained on the fall housing waitlist. Presumably, a majority of them won’t succeed in gaining access especially with only a month left before the fall term. How long will disillusioned students put up with The College’s broken promises and empty excuses? It is difficult to say, but this issue starts from the top, whose priorities never seem to align with the interests of its main constituents, students. When current undergraduates reflect on their time at The College a few decades from now, half of their undergraduate experience won’t even be at The College. President Hanlon and The Board of Trustees just do not seem to care