While students are scrambling to figure out where they would like to live next fall, some have discovered that becoming a "friend" of a fraternity or selective house may not be quite as easy as it was last year.
The housing assignments office defines "friends of the house" as independents who are chosen by a selective living group to fill empty bed spaces within the group's dormitory section. Last year, many selective groups were able to fill all of the extra beds in their sections with independents, without any set limit on how many they could take.
"We were too flexible with [the policy] last year," said Bill Burig, assistant dean of student development. This year, the policy will remain the same as it always has except that this year the housing assignments office will adhere more strictly to it, he said.
The housing policy states that a living group may only be given the opportunity to fill empty bed spaces within its section with friends of the house if they have already filled between 90 and 100 percent of their assigned space, Burig said.
Burig added that fraternities and selective living groups will not be able to fill their sections beyond the set limit for that living group.
If a fraternity is allocated 45 bed spaces and occupies a dormitory section with 50 beds, for example, they will not be allowed to occupy any more than 45 of those 50 beds. If the fraternity in that section only has 42 brothers, therefore, it may be allowed to add three friends of the house, not eight, Burig said. The additional five beds would be filled with independents from the housing lottery.
For living groups that cannot fill at least 90 percent of their allocated space, Burig said, the current housing policy dictates three options. First, all of the extra bed spaces may be allocated to independents from the lottery. Second, it might be possible to move the house to a location with fewer bed spaces. Third, in extreme cases when a group can only fill a very small percentage of its assigned space, the Office of Student Development may terminate the residential status of that group.
Trinity sophomore Berry Brooks, housing coordinator for Kappa Alpha fraternity, said that he would have some objection to that policy. While the Kappa Alpha fraternity is limited to 50 bed spaces, the section they occupy holds 53 beds, Brooks said. He said that it would seem most logical to place three more friends of the fraternity in those beds than to have three random independents placed there.
But Burig said that to do that would be unfair to many independents. "Independent students raised the question of why some students who just happened to know members of the houses who had extra space were assigned that space," Burig said. This year, he said, those extra spaces will remain available to independent lottery participants.
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