A wrong housing move

By Editorial

Santa Clara decided recently that the South Alameda apartment complex will house graduate students beginning next fall.

This counter-intuitive decision comes amid the university's long-term mission to house 75 percent of the undergraduate population living on campus in one of 11 Residential Learning Communities.

This decision is another in the history of housing moves that have left us â€" and many other undergraduates â€" scratching our heads.

It also reflects the university's relentless pursuit to force-feed the RLC program, which unfairly rewards certain students with better housing conditions while leaving others with worse conditions, solely because of the RLC in which they live.

Every year, students come here having blindly chosen an RLC by checking a box inside the letter-of-acceptance pamphlet. If students knew of the benefits in housing they'd receive by picking one RLC over another, most would choose whichever one could get them into Sobrato.

What happened to the days when you paid your dues? When all freshmen lived in Swig and all the sophomores lived in Dunne? Some remember when Sobrato was considered an upper-classmen facility reserved to older students. Now juniors live in Swig, arguably the worst building, and freshmen in Casa, arguably the Ritz Carlton.

If the university wants to build "community," why house freshmen with juniors? The fun of being a freshman is that everyone's in the same boat: No one knows anyone, which forces people to meet one another. Sophomores in Dunne have fewer incentives to go out of their way to meet new freshmen because they've already established their friends.

It is obvious that realities get shoved by the wayside in this wacky RLC system. Now, undergraduates will take another hit with South Alamedas off the market. What a mess.