A group of students could create drastic changes in the College's residential life system as it proposes to create Bowdoin's first cooperative residence within the next few years.
The College administration has yet to agree to any concrete plans, however, Interim Director of the Office of Residential Life Kimberly A. Pacelli said a co-op at Bowdoin is "an interesting idea." She added that she is "working with [the interested students] to achieve their goal."
For over a year, a group of students?spearheaded by Ruth Morrison, Katherine Kirklin, and Mike Taylor, all class of 2007?has been crafting a plan for a cooperative living arrangement in Burnett House. Currently Burnett is one of the 19 official upper-class residence halls.
At an hour-long informational meeting on Monday, the co-op planners enthusiastically shared their ideas with about forty interested students who attended the meeting. The presence of that many people, mostly first and second-year students, was, for Morrison, "incredibly encouraging."
The cooperative at Bowdoin will incorporate a number of key values: communal living, consensus voting, environmental friendliness, and a reduced reliance on the College for services.
The manifestations of this increased self-reliance include residents cooking their own meals and cleaning their house without the help of Bowdoin-provided housekeeping.
Cooperative living is not new. "In history," Morrison said in a telephone interview, "there's a lot of precedent for this [idea] of communal living." Many colleges across the country have co-ops, she added.
The plan for the co-op house is to have no house officers or majority rule. Although consensus voting can be time-consuming, it has many advantages, according to Morrison. Living by "consensus is not an efficient way to manage time but is an extremely efficient way to manage people's opinions," she said. In a house where consensus rules, she added, no one gets marginalized.
Living in the co-op will "definitely be a commitment" since the hope is that all members will be equally and largely involved in the house, the student planners said. For residents, working for the cooperative will take "a good couple of hours every week," Morrison said in the meeting.
The creation of a co-op house at the College, however, will involve some relatively complicated logistical maneuvers, and some luck. For the '05-'06 school year, those who wish to live in a co-op will all try to get into Burnett House in the housing lottery. Assuming they are successful, the house would be run like a co-op in a trial run.
The next year, in '06-'07, the same kind of pilot program would continue, according to Pacelli. If it were successful, Burnett could become an official College House affiliated with one of the new first-year dorms in '07-'08. Approval would be required from both the Inter-House Council and the Board of Trustees.
One major obstacle concerns Bowdoin's prohibition on "theme housing."
In an interview, Pacelli shared her worries about how a co-op would fit in with Bowdoin's residential life policy as elaborated in the "Interim Report of The Commission on Residential Life to The Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College," adopted in 1997. This document states that "the College will not develop a theme house program..." (Part III, Section D).
"When I first heard about this [co-op idea], my first question was, 'We don't permit theme housing at Bowdoin, so how do we see this fitting into that?'" Pacelli said. This is a question that administrators are currently considering.
Morrison is not worried that a co-op would be in violation of school rules. "The conception of the idea was not as a theme house," she said.
For the '05-'06 school year, thoughts of "theme housing" will not really matter anyway. Dean of Students Craig Bradley elaborated in an email saying that "while we do not permit theme houses per sé...what this group is proposing to do is within the housing lottery policy." He added that "any group could do something like this under our current lottery rules."
The people living in Burnett House next year are likely to be those who support the co-op idea because it is "unusual for students to be angling for Burnett," said Pacelli. The students are excited by the possibilities a cooperative housing arrangement provides.
At Monday's meeting, Kirklin exuberantly said that with regard to the co-operative idea, "pretty much, the sky is the limit!"
Pacelli emphasized that although the idea was an exciting one, "it's not a done deal. We'll have to see how it plays out."