The end of Tufts House

[sniffnoy]

Well, so it is.

I mentioned this briefly earlier but now I have more details. (Due to notes from a meeting with Katie Callow-Wright sent out on the Tufts House mailing list (thank you, Robin Ye) -- yes, I'm still on the mailing list.) The University of Chicago is going to be closing Pierce Tower at the end of the year -- the building simply has too many problems and costs too much to maintain. A new dorm, for now just to be called "North Campus Residence Hall", will be built in its place (also absorbing North Field as well).

The existing houses will continue to exist and will be moved to other locations -- but probably won't be moved back to North Campus later. (Like how some of the houses in Max came from the old Woodlawn dorm. Is that what the building was called? I no longer remember, or which houses came from it; it was before my time anyway.)

Here's where things get a little confusing. I am having to look some of this up as I write this.

The most likely plan is, Shorey and Henderson move to International House -- wait, what? IHouse isn't part of the university housing system. I didn't even realize the university own/ran it. I'm confused now; I don't understand what the hell the status of IHouse is, then. It's just a place where students can live that the university runs but which isn't part of the housing system, I guess? Well, now it partly will be.

But the part I care about is Tufts House, of course, and the plan is that Tufts and Thompson Houses will be merged and put in the New Grad Residence Hall (which won't actually be housing graduate students anymore). Yup. (Though they're the least objectionable of the other Pierce houses to be merged with, certainly.) And it seems from people's reactions that the resulting house will be mostly Thompson. Also apparently there's precedent for merging houses, and the notes give the example of Lynn and Mathews Houses in BJ being merged into Lynn-Mathews House -- wait, what? Huh, guess that happened after I left. (Merging houses reduces staff and so saves money.)

Also, the new versions of the houses will be larger -- more like 90 people instead of 60. Not sure what to make of that. Sounds a bit big.

Also the housing guys at UChicago need to get their website in order because apparently there's a house of undergrads (Midway House) already existing in the New Grad Residence Hall but I don't see how you'd find that out browsing their website. Also, the name "Midway House" sounds familiar. They were in Shoreland, right? At least I figure they must have been in Shoreland seeing as that's the only dorm that's closed down recently. Blech. A history of this stuff would be helpful.

As I mentioned earlier, the good thing is, the people in Housing do intend to preserve the good aspects of Pierce in its replacement. But the current Pierce houses won't get any of the benefit of that, and will be transformed by their new environment, whatever that might be...

Well, at least Jack and Sarah get the honor of being the last RHs of Tufts House as we know it.

-Harry

Comments

[pklemica]

Linn and Mathews houses were physically right next to each other already - us Mathewsniks often walked through Linn to get the the dining hall (before they opened South Campus and moved the entrance... after our time) when it was cold out - and were on very good terms: we had some joint house sports teams, and sometimes joint activities, iirc. I believe the merge happened 2 years after you and I graduated?

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Hm, didn't know about that. Tufts and Thompson is much less fitting. I mean, they're not the hated enemy like Henderson or Shorey, but they're still one of the other houses of Pierce and hence inherently kind of suspicious, even if we're often pretty neutral towards them. It's hardly inconceivable that we might have become friendly towards them (I think we have been in the past), but I don't get the sense that that has happened. (What Thompson House might think of us, I couldn't say. I mean really, who can possibly understand the minds of such foreign devils?)

OK, in actuality it's hard to imagine such things causing serious problems for a merger, seeing as how the enmity towards Henderson and Shorey is more towards some nebulous notion of these houses as a whole rather than the actual individual people of Henderson and Shorey, who, after all, we can work together with just fine during Scav, or get along just fine with down in TANSTAAFL, and who were randomly picked for their houses just as we were. Well -- if the houses were being merged as they existed, I wouldn't be surprised to find that good old Tufts House tribalism meant that the [former] Tuftsians continued to consider the [former] Thompsonites (is that what they call themselves?) generally suspicious, and mostly just associated with each other. I just mean you wouldn't get any outright fighting or real enmity between the groups. But then that's perhaps a pretty weak statement, as cliquishness would probably occur when merging any two houses that aren't particularly associated, or even if they were; that Tufts House is particularly tribal doesn't really come into play there. In any case, that's if they were to be merged as existing, when in reality you'd have first-years entering, so any remaining distinction would probably dissolve in at most 2 years or so.

Dodd and Mead were once separate houses too, weren't they? I mean, not anytime recently, but they were, right?

[pklemica]

Yeah, way way back when, I believe they were.

[ogf295.livejournal.com]

I read the same notes as you. I must say that a Tufts-Thompson merger would be most logical, but it is not a lock.

I do find it a bit disappointing. I was the one who pushed through a constitutional amendment in which Tufts house would start campaigning housing to maintain its name/identity when it became evident that the end of Pierce was at hand. We started making the suggestion of preserving the houses last year, and it seems to have had the effect of increasing the desire to keep houses intact... just not Tufts. Slightly Upsetting.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not a lock. But writing about probability distributions is hard. :P

And yeah, that is perverse.