Three Dorm Experiments

THE Commission on Campus Life and Its Regulation, established by President Dickey in December to examine all phases of undergraduate social life in the light of postwar changes in the student body, last month submitted a set of interim recommendations to the President as its first formal action following weeks of detailed study. The report was made by Prof. Frank G. Ryder, chairman of the Commission, with the unanimous agreement of the nine voting members and eleven associate members engaged in the survey.

These first recommendations involve three dormitories, in each of which the Commission wants to try a different experiment toward improving dormitory life. The major proposals are for a married resident adviser in Cutter Hall, the former Clark School building newly opened as a dormitory this semester; the selection of three non-resident faculty advisers by the students living in South Massachusetts Hall; and the creation of a dormitory study hall in the existing social room in Butterfield Hall. The completion of the common rooms in Cutter and South Mass as lounges was also recommended.

The Commission's experiment in Cutter Hall calls for the provision of an apartment for the married resident adviser, whose teaching load would be reduced in order to enable him to give time to academic and social counseling. Cutter Hall lends itself well to this plan, since its first floor consists of rooms for such an apartment, plus a large social room for student residents. The upper floors, providing rooms for 37 students, would still constitute a dormitory in the normal sense.

The Commission's plan for South Massachusetts Hall calls for the weekly rotation of the three non-resident faculty advisers, who would visit the dormitory in order to "serve as a generating force for educational and social ideas, as a source of counsel and guidance, and as an avenue of referral." It is intended that the dormitory committees for both South Mass and Cutter "should not be supplanted but aided and encouraged and their cooperation sought in wider areas."

The recommendation for Butterfield Halls bears upon the Commission's endeavor to improve study conditions in the dorms. In addition to proposing this experimental study hall, the Commission has prepared a student questionnaire about study conditions in order to assemble data for further possible recommendations.

The interim recommendations, which President Dickey now has under advisement, ask that South Mass and Cutter Halls be continued as mixed dormitories for students of all four classes. The Commission thereby indicated that it has been exploring the advisability of creating special freshman dormitories at Dartmouth. This was one of the points for study that President Dickey raised in his December radio address to the undergraduates announcing the establishment of the Commission on Campus Life and Its Regulation.