Living like queens in Durfee's Old Campus palace

My suite got first pick in last spring's room draw. We had known for weeks exactly where we wanted to live: Durfee B21. Some of us had already spent significant time in that suite and were in love with the high, white ceilings, the blond hardwood floors, the in-suite bathroom, the enormous singles. Nothing in JE would be as nice and so as long as we had the chance, we were moving out.

As of this moment, nothing has occurred to change my feelings about living in Durfee. My room is huge and gorgeous and I'm surrounded by friends from my college. While I still spend a lot of time in JE proper, my dead-central location also gives me easier access to the resources of the rest of the University. My suitemates and I have actually been plotting how to do this again for our senior year.

But I just met someone who lives in the only suite of juniors in all of Lawrance. These guys are completely surrounded by freshmen and way across campus from Stiles. And think of those two Calhoun annex suites stranded at the top of my entryway, and all those TD students stuck in the crumbly old language lab out in Hamden somewhere.

There are very particular reasons why I'm so happy here. What if the circumstances were different and I had been forced to move out of my college? What if it had been a nice college, like Berkeley? What if my annex suite was not so nice? What if there were strangers living on all sides? What if my college were so far away that it would be too inconvenient to eat dinner there? I would be very unhappy, and no one should be very unhappy with their junior-year housing.

Especially not at Yale, where the residential philosophy is supposed to be that you have a home for four years. Your relationship with your college and the people in it is supposed to grow closer and happier each year. The propaganda has worked on me: I belong to JE. I believe that my Yale experience is both defined and made wonderful by my JE family. I honestly can't imagine life here without this affiliation. I would be hurt and angry, not to mention completely at loose ends, if the Administration had handed me a mandate to get out.

Not everyone needs to buy into the system. One can make friends outside of one's college and one can move off-campus. But the system is designed to be bought into; the residential colleges were made to play big roles in their members' lives. If they weren't, freshmen would be mixed together randomly and sophomores would decide where to live. Masters wouldn't exist and Deans would be mere administrators.

Yale can stand by its design and make it work by ensuring that everyone who wants to go along with the advertised program has the opportunity. If that means accepting fewer applicants, so be it. The campus was only built to hold a certain number of people. Rebuilding the campus to hold more people is another reasonable option. But shuffling and squeezing students at the expense of a privilege we were led to believe is guaranteed is deceitful and wrong, no matter how much I actually love my suite. Rachel Kamins is a junior in Jonathan Edwards.

Graphic by Eugene Wong.

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