DePauw’s housing system is unfairly biased against students without Greek affiliation. Days after formal recruitment, a majority of the first-year class prepares to spend the next year living with their newly-selected brothers or sisters; however, a small percentage of the class is consigned to another year of dormitory living, be it Mason or—the horror!—Bloomington Street or Senior Halls. The campus dorms are falling into disrepair while Greek houses are becoming ever more lavish.
Dormitory improvements are laughably far down the list of “things to fix after we finish building all the other things,” so desirable dorms are still years away. Some Greek houses have such good infrastructure that their alumni have been able to turn their funds toward monuments; donors from Phi Kappa Psi and Beta Theta Pi have bought their houses a front-yard clock and rock, respectively. Furthermore, sophomore independent students lack even the power to group up beyond the scale of roommates, worsening their second-year housing situation further. Maybe Greg Dillon will throw you a bone and place you near your friends, but very possibly not.
The problems continue even into the third and fourth years of housing. Independent students are forced to compete in the housing lottery with groups of four, six and eight Greek students. Many Rector Village apartment floors—the newest and nicest in DePauw housing—belong exclusively to groups from individual Greek organizations. Many independent students do live in campus duplexes, but the majority of those houses are falling apart at the seams.
As a solution, I propose two changes to the housing system: 1) allow sophomores to enter the housing lottery and 2) give lottery precedence to groups that feature a minority of Greek-affiliated students. Allowing sophomores into the lottery would grant younger independent students an opportunity to avoid the decrepit horrors of DePauw’s upperclassman dorms. Furthermore, an earlier on-campus apartment search would foster more communication within a group that often gets ignored during the Greek brouhahas of recruitment and new member education periods.
My second recommendation is slightly more complex, and its implementation depends on what behaviors the community wishes to encourage. Give precedence to all-independent groups? Apartments of mixed Greek affiliations? I believe the best way to encourage heterologous living groups would be higher lottery rankings for groups of which half or fewer students hold active Greek affiliation. This system would foster communication and friendship between Greek organizations and independent students, and it would also promote diversity of affiliation within housing units.
Of course, jigging the housing lottery to favor independent students will not solve all of DePauw’s housing woes. Ultimately, there will need to be significant investment in renovations to existing dormitories and the construction of new, suite-style upperclassman dorms in which students actually want to live. The goal of new housing is distant, however: DePauw has committed to renovating Roy O. West and completing Hoover Hall with funds from the Campaign for DePauw, but numerous other projects will remain in “Planning Phase” limbo for quite some time.