One of the decisions Connecticut College has made that I have never been able to support was to restrict off-campus housing. The announcement of such a change, made during my junior year, was almost unbelievable.
The notification itself felt like a sudden act of violence to my class’s freshman year ambitions of living off-campus. In the 2012-2013 Academic Year, we had become familiar with seniors who lived in their own houses. The lofty improvement of their living situations, including houses on Gallows, Williams St., Bank St., and my own favorite, a friend’s house nestled into the beginning of the Mamacoke island trail, overshadowed the homely living conditions of a freshman year triple.
The juxtaposition brought some balance to the ‘Camp Conn’ aesthetic of our small campus. As freshman, we could stomach that our lot was a rite of passage, and that one day we’d have the opportunity to live across the street, if we wanted, in something that more closely resembled ‘real life.’
That cycle of expectation was broken when off-campus housing vanished. It simply became non-existent, and campus climate adapted, as it always has, to another administrative policy change addressing circumstances that were deemed antiquated and/or unsafe (i.e. Fishbowl, the quintessential ‘senior spring’ naked run from its namesake to ‘The Gong’ in Castle Court).
Ridges and Winchesters became a prize to be scrambled over through the Office of Residential Life’s selection process, and the option to simply not pay room and board disappeared, unless you intended to be a part-time student.
The gut-reaction of the student body blamed, and continues to blame, an administrative agenda of anti-party reform. This is partially because it’s easy to do, and partially because the reason for the decision has never been well-explained, a fact which only made the issue more vexing to students. Regardless, if the College is interested in preventing the expectable off-campus party and its discontents, then eliminating off-campus housing is a drastic oversimplification of the problem.
Firstly, it bottlenecks a sizeable portion of night-time social life towards the bars (most often one bar). Alternatively, if the River Ridges or the Winchesters become the ‘it’ destination, then student traffic is taking place across Mohegan Avenue. In a perfect world in which students took the windy, inconvenient bridge to cross over the road, that traffic wouldn’t be as scary as it is. But in reality it’s probably safer for students to be taking Ubers and taxis to the bars rather than have them sprint across Route 32.
In both scenarios, the students that are going out are hardly conducting themselves as the College and Honor Code expects them to, and are doing so in an extremely public manner. As it concerns our relationship to the city, neither Mitchell College nor the Coast Guard students swarm the roadway or Bank St. in such a manner. If it’s safety or image that we should be concerned about, such a solution is patchwork at best. There are, of course, other reasons that have been voiced as to why students ought not to live off-campus. It’s exclusive. It separates the student body. It would raise the price of living in New London, forcing current residents out, or maybe that the College is historically residential, and should therefore remain that way.
The opposing position, espoused by literally every senior I know, is that seniors should be allowed to live wherever they want, while 81.1% of all students think upperclassmen should be allowed to live off campus, according to a recently poll by The College Voice. Almost all of us are no longer minors and feel patronized both by the decision and by the lack of dialogue around it. Justifiably or not, seniors don’t feel like they should be policed the same way they were when they were first-years, nor should they be forced to live anywhere. Across the board, seniors are expected to be independent – they are working on theses, running clubs, engaging and shaping our school. Their being mandated to live anywhere is a disempowerment.
The off-campus housing debate is more expansive than it is a griping diatribe by seniors who want exclusively earned partying privileges. The disallowing of off-campus housing by upper classmen appears hypocritical to a school that claims to enjoy a ‘strong and mutual relationship with New London,’ as per its website.
Prohibiting students from living off campus is a significant detractor from the type of organic, human interactions that I would categorize as ‘strong’ and ‘mutual,’ It feels more like a legislative affirmation of the segregation between the Campus and the City that we so often feel and allude to. Furthermore, concerning housing prices, the number of students that have typically lived off-campus in the past, a figure somewhere between fifteen and thirty students, doesn’t feel like it would have the gentrifying impact that some are concerned about.
It may well be that the relevance of the off-campus housing debate will all but evaporate with the graduation of the Senior Class. But there are issues of significance to unpack in undertaking any such decision, specifically that of the relationship between the College’s leaders and the region at large. As groups like the Strategic Planning Committee approach the evolution of the College, we should allow space for seniors to be more independent, as most of us already are, rather than do the opposite. And in the future, any decision of such caliber ought to be one communicated more effectively to the student bodies concerned. •
