<p>Cue7’s long post is so much more thoughtful and specific than the self-important twaddle in the Maroon editorial. I am glad he thinks he knows what that key gnomic phrase meant, but I note that every student commentator on the Maroon website thought it was silly.</p>
<p>Anyway, a few comments, although it won’t surprise anyone that I hardly see this as the crisis that Cue7 does.</p>
<p>I agree completely on the house size issue. But the key is not only larger houses, it’s larger, four-year houses. Until recently, only Snitchcock has had a meaningful four-year retention rate. To keep kids for four years, you need to give them better rooms as seniors than they had as first-years, and facilities better than they can get elsewhere. That’s key to the Harvard and Yale house systems, and that remains a huge stumbling block everywhere else. It’s not that Chicago doesn’t have the space – it has tons of space – it’s that it’s really expensive to build four-year houses. I don’t think it’s going to happen.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I think it’s ironic that Cue7 keeps using Penn as an example, when Penn (a) has a generally failed house system, too, but with much larger houses, and (b) houses only about half of its students in its own dorms, just like Chicago. It’s not a unified student body at all. There is great resentment of Wharton, and great disrespect towards Nursing. There is a constant undertow of resentment against people from the New York Metropolitan Area. I know a zillion Penn alums, and I have never heard anyone suggest that Smokey Joes’s was a key part of his college experience. Or that Spring Fling was somehow life-changing, identity forging. It’s roughly the same spring party they have everywhere – the one they call Summer Breeze at Chicago.</p>
<p>And . . . is he really serious about Wawa? Wawa is a regional convenience store chain. It’s a good one – better than the national chains – but that’s all it is, a good chain store. I’m glad it apparently adds so much to student life at Princeton, but that doesn’t make me think much of student life at Princeton.</p>
<p>My spouse and I met and fell in love at a college that has never been accused of having a dormant sense of identity, the one with the great residential houses, great traditions, great non-academic institutions. So, how many of those community-forging things did we have in common? Pretty much none. We were in the same college. In five semesters of overlap, we were never once at the same party. She never set foot in the college bar where I spent 2-3 evenings/week (around the corner from where she lived for a year). She went to one football game, ever. Where did we talk? The library, of course, just like most of our classmates, and just like our kids at Chicago. What did we talk about? The world, but also a lot about what we were studying. Academics were really important. We were in the same freshman core curriculum program and also a great internship program, in each case a year apart. </p>
<p>And the thing is, although we had very few things we shared, we have exactly the same feelings about the college, and so do my friends and her friends, two sets of people with hardly any connections other than us. When we were back for a big reunion of mine, she was stunned at how easy it was for her to talk to friends of mine whom she had barely met before, because there was a really strong sense of common identity, and it wasn’t based on stupid crap like Spring Fling, or bladderball, or Rudy’s. It was based on common intellectual experience, the same sort of thing that ought to – and I believe, does – provide a sense of common identity at Chicago.</p>