The administrators of this university do not live here, so perhaps someone needs to let them know: The residential colleges are jokes. The only sense of community I have with fellow Wilsonites is a shared sense of shame at our bad architecture. Wilsonites even take our meals up campus or in Whitman. The only people who actually eat in Wilcox are the truly lazy and athletes coming back from practice beyond Fine Hall.
Most students who oppose expanding the colleges suspect that the colleges' growth is intended to strangle the eating clubs. To me this is a matter of little significance, since my social life doesn't revolve around the Street. But I do think the University risks destroying the residential colleges completely if it enlarges them farther.
When I said that the colleges were jokes, I meant that socially. For administrative purposes I'm sure they're very useful, just like states are handy subdivisions of America. (You can tell I would never have made a good Confederate.) There is also one vestigial bond holding back the anarchy that Nassau Hall would cause if, say, it annexed Pyne onto Whitman: architecture.
You can tell that Whitman is unique because it looks like nothing around it. Sure, Dillon is also Gothic, but they're obviously separate structures, and not just because they're separated by a road. Wilson, for its part, is clearly differentiated from the rising dorms of New Butler. Not only is New Butler shiny, it also managed to narrowly avoid the Jersey Motel Modern look of our most famous president's namesake college. Granted, Rocky and Mathey are impossible to tell apart for anyone who doesn't live there, but they're so readily confused because they're so organic; they form a distinctive block.
But if the colleges annex Walker, Nassau Hall will seriously risk the total disintegration of the college system. I think it's ridiculous that they can claim one quarter of Spelman is part of Whitman. It's just not. How would you feel if you thought you were getting the white, Gothic castle and wound up instead in a parking-garage-cum-fishbowl?
There is no sense of cohesion among students within colleges. I am not blaming anybody, nor am I making suggestions: I am merely observing an empirical fact. We are not Oxford, we are not Cambridge. Our colleges are fake institutions, each of them a useful shorthand for a clutch of buildings that look alike. Deprive them of this definition, and you will shortly deprive them of any definition at all.
The only alternative I can see -short of dissolving most of Princeton administration and vesting it in six autonomous bodies - would be to assign students to their colleges for four years, ban them from taking their meals out and gate the communities. I don't want that, and I don't think anybody else does either. But we have to acknowledge that under the current system students have no identification with their colleges. If I meet another person from Wilson, that only suggests to me that they can tell 1939 Hall from 1937. This is not strong common ground.
I don't think it's a bad thing that the colleges are not communities. There's no reason why the Housing Department should be able to make perfect friendships on the basis of six adjectives and a preference for sub-free. I have friends from out of my residential college who practically live in my quad. Were we to seal off Wilson, and had I to sign them in every time they came to visit, that would get very annoying very fast. I think the current system works well because it allows us to behave like real human beings and spend our time with whomever we like.
So the colleges only have existence as distinct sets of buildings. If Nassau Hall annexes Walker onto the Butler organism, that graft will surely perish. Or, worse, the entire college itself will collapse. For if Walker can be stuck onto Butler, why not Mathey? How about giving Scully to Forbes? Yes, these are extreme examples, but if the colleges aren't linked by their architecture then I won't know where one begins, where another ends and what's upperclass or not. Then the whole thing will be mush, and the only real division will be dining hall students v. eating clubs v. independents.
The University made a mistake by allocating part of Spelman to Whitman. The administration should not compound that error by further diluting the College system.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol @princeton.edu.
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