The coup d'ecole continues

predetermined decision that any ... [upperclass dorms] are going to be reassigned" Combined with the University's research into which dorms it can safely appropriate

What makes this so galling is that if any changes are warranted, the University should be moving dorms out of the residential colleges, not into them. After all, the new four-year Butler College will be completed this year, meaning that there will be more dorms available for upperclassmen in the colleges without any need for expansion. As recently as March, Executive Vice President Mark Burstein said he expected 300 upperclassmen in four-year colleges - the same number as today - in 2009. But he followed that prediction with the administration's usual caveat that the University reserved the right to expand the four-year colleges if (manufactured) high demand for them necessitates it, thereby nullifying the prediction. Besides, any further rise in the population of the four-year colleges would make a mockery of past promises by Burstein that the residential college system would be able to "house and regularly feed approximately 250 upperclass students" by 2012 - a number we already exceed by 20 percent and will certainly soon exceed by a much higher margin.

There is, of course, a very small sliver of a silver lining in all this. As someone who has consistently criticized the administration for failing to take student input into account on major decisions, I have to consider the University's decision to allocate dorms via plebiscite a step in the right direction. I hate the ends that will inevitably come from this, but the means are palatable.

Incidentally, the kind of survey the Housing Department is set to debut is guaranteed to produce an option "most popular among the student body" by default. After all, unless every student votes against every one of these options, then by definition one of the options will have more support than the others, and the University can perversely claim to be following student opinion. By providing so many bad options, the University makes the slightly better ones look great. I mean, does the Housing Department really think it's even conceivably a good idea to take part of the junior slums or Patton Hall for the residential colleges?

Of course it doesn't. This is the oldest negotiating trick in the book. First, you make a totally unreasonable request that will drive students insane, like putting Pyne Hall or more of Spelman into Whitman. If students give in, then great! If not, you "compromise" by asking for what you really wanted all along, i.e., Scully slowly swallowed by Butler and Little increasingly taken over by Mathey. Anyone who still opposes you is then unreasonably standing in the way of a compromise. Game, set, match, repeat in 2009 and 2010 and ... This is, indeed, exactly what happened with the Spelman debacle earlier this year, though in that case it's possible that the University just accidentally stumbled onto a brilliant maneuver. This time, it's clearly part of a plan.

Long before my class' 25th reunion, the changes will be complete. Klaus can claim that "even if we wanted to house and feed all of our upperclass students, we don't have the capacity or the desire, at the moment, to go in that direction." The key phrase there is "at the moment," because at some future moment, that will no longer be true.

Nowhere in the process of gradual annexation is the University pressuring or coercing anybody; as Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel has said, "nobody's eliminating anything, we're just adding options." Of course, the University is constantly adding just one kind of option without doing anything to improve the other options, like renovating dilapidated upperclass dorms. If you can't grasp how that's being neutral, then you just don't have the nuance to see things from the administration's point of view.