Last Friday, Director of Residential Life (ResLife) SJ Tinker announced in an email to first-year Reed House applicants that the house would be closed for renovations during the 2026–2027 academic year. Over the next eight years, one College House will be restored yearly, with Burnett House and Helmreich House slated to go next.

Reed’s closure comes amid reports of widespread mold that has impacted the health of residents. College Houses have recently faced a variety of other challenges, including a potentially rabid bat in Baxter House and a burst pipe in Quinby House. Recurring problems like these demonstrate a need for change, which the College is attempting to fix through these renovations.

However, the popularity of these spaces has been waning, even aside from maintenance issues. Surface-level fixes are not enough to make up for the dissatisfaction students have expressed with the College House system.

According to the Fall 2024 Bowdoin Orient Student Survey (BOSS), the College House system was one of the least approved of departments on campus, ranking 28 out of 29 total departments, ahead of only the Brunswick Police Department. Though ranking order often fluctuates from survey to survey, the College House system has consistently ranked in the bottom ten for at least the last five years.

Reservations about the College House system are far from new.

In 1997, students wrote Letters to the Editor voicing concerns about how well the system would replace the community found in fraternities. Fraternity members had the choice to live together for at least three years of college. The College House system features yearly turnover, and members are chosen by ResLife staff, which students originally thought would lead to a lack of shared identity and tradition in comparison to fraternities.

The College attempted to maintain the membership element of fraternities through the affiliate program, in which first years are randomly assigned to a College House and remain members throughout the year. The intention was for first years to engage with sophomores in their specific house through events and activities to build community.

Students originally expressed concerns about the lack of choice in the affiliate system, arguing that randomly assigned membership is not an effective way to build community and removes student input from social decisions.

In practice, affiliate engagement is a virtually nonexistent element of campus culture. Alumni of specific houses also rarely directly engage with the houses they lived in after their sophomore year. As a result, the only students who act as “members” of College Houses are those who live there.

The low approval ratings for the College House system and lack of engagement beyond current house members warrant a full reassessment of the system based on student opinions and feedback. However, this will require more than the usual institutional practice of simply listening to students. The larger student body should be directly involved in future decisions made about the College House system.

College Houses represent a major aspect of the college experience. It is important to balance administrative involvement with student agency, but students should have the majority stake in their social lives.

Renovating the houses is a start. Renovating the system is long overdue.

This editorial represents the majority opinion of the Editorial Board, which is composed of Ava Arepally, Greta Colloton, Sara Coughlin, Miles Palmer, Alex Stein, Catalina Escobedo and Caitlin Panicker.