Feedback on dorms after two quarters

JHS
Tue, 02 Apr 2019 22:48:54 +0000

In the recent past, at least, Snitchcock was seen as the epicenter of University of Chicago Classic.-- full of people who were brilliant, quirky, and creative, and in some cases maybe a step or two onto the autism spectrum, and in other cases maybe a tad too intellectual for their own good. (Of course, there were many perfectly social and tolerably intellectual people, too.) It has dominated Scav notwithstanding its small size by getting close to 100% participation, by being way overrepresented in the corps of judges, and maybe by being a little brilliant, quirky, and creative. Other bits of Snitchcock culture included teas where people present independent academic research they have done and from time to time intolerance of the sort of partying that goes on regularly in other houses. You could get kicked out of Snitchcock for behavior that, in practice, would not get you kicked out of any other dorm. Snitchcock also had – maybe still has – an all-female floor. If it’s still there, it is probably the only vestige left of separate housing for women.

For a long time, Snitchcock was the only dorm with anything like a four-year dorm culture. It was the only dorm with more than a couple fourth-years who weren’t paid RAs (and undergraduate RAs were never assigned to their original houses). Its low turnover and small size meant that there were fewer spots for first-year students there than in any other dorm, and those slots mainly filled up with diehard UChicago enthusiasts who were accepted EA and committed before Christmas to enroll the following fall.

The four-year nature of Snitchcock really made it a key repository of UChicago folklore. Every year, there were people in Snitchcock who had been friends with people who had started at Chicago seven years earlier. In most dorms, the effective institutional memory horizon was more like 2-3 years.