A petition denouncing recent housing guidelines that require 30 percent of selective living group and greek housing residents to be upperclassmen has gained support from many student groups, including Duke Student Government.
Although this policy was announced in January 2012, Housing, Dining and Residence Life declared that they would begin enforcing the policy in Fall 2014. In response, DSG President Lavanya Sunder, a junior, and sophomore Zach Gorwitz, vice president for residential life, co-wrote a petition expressing their disapproval of the guidelines. They incorporated input from Sunder’s executive board, the DSG residential life committee and an Interfraternity Council representative.
“We don’t approve of the guidelines because we think they will be detrimental to aspects of the SLG experience,” Sunder said. “We’ve had issues like this in the past, and we just felt like we hit a wall in terms of progress and that this was the next step in the process.”
Gorwitz said that the petition came about as a result of dissatisfaction throughout campus, within several different housing models.
"We realized the overwhelming amount of student opposition to the new guidelines," Gorwitz said. "Students voiced their concerns to me in texts, calls, emails, and Chronicle columns and I wanted to bring those concerns to the administration."
One of DSG’s main issues with the policy is that it will restrict the number of bed spaces that can be filled by sophomores to 70 percent of the total section allotment. This restriction has the potential to damage camaraderie within the new pledge classes, Sunder said.
“We feel that the policy underestimates the value of inter-community within a pledge class and how important this is to an SLG,” she said.
Sunder also disagreed with HDRL’s claim that increasing the number of upperclassmen in section will result in more opportunities for mentorship—saying that such opportunities are already well in place, in various settings.
“Membership opportunities exist outside of the house during occasions like chapter meetings, big-little events and philanthropy events,” she said.
She added that the policy could also place unjust financial difficulties on seniors who wish to seek cheaper, off-campus apartments and puts pressure on juniors to skip studying abroad in order to fill housing quotas for their SLG.
Sunder said that although she understands HDRL policies requiring beds to be filled in SLG living spaces, she doesn’t think the new policy will address this concern—especially since there are other ways to enforce this rule.
“If a group doesn’t fill their beds, then something should be done, but all of the groups who do not currently meet the quota of 30 percent upperclassmen are filling their beds,” she said.
Gorwitz said that he has worked alongside administration on this issue, but feels as though he must take a stance for SLG rights.
"While I see the administration’s perspective and I have been working with them for months on this issue, the intensity of student opposition has convinced me that granting SLG’s autonomy when filling their sections is the correct policy and one I have a duty to fight for as the DSG VP of Residential Life," Gorwitz said.
With about 40 percent of the undergraduate student body participating in SLG or greek life, Sunder hopes that the petition will receive around 1,000 signatures from the student body.
“Within the first five or 10 minutes of its release, we already had about 20 petitions signed and returned to us,” she said.
This article has been updated to clarify ambiguous language surrounding the restriction on sophomore bed spaces.
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