I don’t like complaining (I love it), but there’s room for improvement at this college. In this column, I break down the problems with the College that annoy me the most.

Last week, the Office of Campus Life (OCL) announced a plan to move all Theme/Affinity/Program/Special Interest (TAPSI) housing (including affinity houses like Eban House) to the Mark Hopkins dorm for the 2023-24 school year. While the College has since announced that it will allow all affinity houses to remain in their existing locations next year, the original plan showed a stunning lack of consideration of student input. The Community Coordinators (CCs) for the majority of TAPSI housing were not consulted about or even warned of the decision. 

Is anyone else getting déjà vu? Last year, a similar headline broke: The TAPSI review committee decided to move Eban House out of Wood House, instead placing the Performing Arts House in the dorm. Neither the CCs for Eban nor Performing Arts were told of this decision before it was announced (OCL eventually reversed the decision and placed Eban in Wood at the request of both houses).

I am confused about the College’s decision-making process: How did it manage to make such poor decisions, disregarding essential student input in the process, just seven months apart? I have a hard time believing that both of these missteps were a result of simple negligence.

This pattern of leaving students out of decisions that directly impact (only) our lives is not confined to TAPSI, although that is an especially egregious example. OCL also recently decided to give better housing selection odds to students who were forced to live in flex rooms — singles that were converted into doubles — during previous years. However, due to a “lack of precise measurements,” no rooms in Williams Hall or Sage Hall were designated as flex rooms. Complaints from students prompted the administration to hone their measurements, and the College eventually designated 35 more rooms as flex rooms, thereby granting 70 overlooked students their extra points. Not only were students not consulted about this new flex-point rule, but they were not even asked whether the rooms they lived in might be considered flex rooms. The administration decided that measuring first-year rooms was infeasible and chose not to consult with the students living in these dorms about how best to proceed.

The examples don’t stop there. The College decided to stop giving Junior Advisors (JA) an advantage in the co-op or general housing lotteries, again without consulting current JAs or even giving them advanced notice. The College cut managers’ budgets by 15 percent and student employment spending by 33 percent without reaching out to students about how to best mitigate the negative impacts of these cuts, even though we are affected by these decisions. Even small changes — like the implementation of Okta Verify — are only announced after they are enacted. The administration consistently makes decisions that directly impact the student experience without first asking us about what we think. 

The College’s lack of regard for student opinions does not just lead to poorly thought-out decisions, although that is often one repercussion. It also leads to an adversarial relationship between students and administration. When decisions are made by administrators, these changes are made for students instead of with students. When student employment is cut without warning or housing decisions are made unexpectedly, many students — myself included — react with anger toward the administration. From my perspective, a decision that negatively impacts me and my peers has been unilaterally made by people who are not directly affected by it. The administration does not eat worse food when the endowment loses money in the market or live in more secluded housing when instructing TAPSI communities to do so. The administration simply makes these decisions, purportedly with our best interests at heart, and then enforces them without having sought an adequate amount of student input.

So what is the simple answer to this frustrating dilemma? Just ask students! We are adults attending an elite institution that supposedly trains us to become capable and independent decision-makers. If we are not informed enough to help decide how the College should be run, then the College is failing in its mission. But by virtue of being the ones affected by College policies, students have knowledge that allows us to make more informed decisions about some policies than College administrators. So, before the College makes sweeping decisions that impact TAPSI houses, it should ask all of the students affected by the decision to weigh in on the proposed plan and suggest some better solutions. Before changing the housing lottery or cutting budgets or adding a new multi-factor authentication system, send out a survey to each and every student asking us what we think. And then, when the responses are in, actually read our answers and take them into consideration. Reach out to us individually and ask for our help. Change the policy when we propose better solutions, and do so before the policy has been announced or put into effect. The relationship between students and administration does not need to be adversarial and top-down. It can, and in fact must, be collaborative. 

Harry Albert ’25 is a philosophy and computer science major from Pittsfield, Mass.