LETTER: College system limits social life at Rice

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by Amy McKay

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To the editor:

In last week's editorial section ( Thresher, Jan. 26), the editor remarked that disallowing O-Week jacks would be as detrimental to Rice as eliminating the college system itself.

This prompted me to ask, what would be so bad about that?

The college system was intended to foster interaction between the existing cliques, which were divided by acadmic department or high school.

Today some argue that there is not enough camraderie among majors, especially on the academic side where there are no labs or homework sets.

Also, today Rice is a much more cosmopolitan school than it was in the '50s; there are far too many high schools represented for cliques to develop along these lines.

The college system was also intended to create a sort of family for students.

It is successful in this -- now the members of our colleges are all our brothers and sisters (instead of our dates) and our business is everyone else's business.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels stifled by the fact that anyone in the college who's paying attention knows all the gossip, all the personal problems, and whose face I see every day, like it or not.

We are basically locked, from O-Week on, into the same set of 90 or so people for four years.

That is why it is so refreshing to greet the incoming freshmen.

If you don't meet your significant other early on in your college, you probably never will, and moreover, if the friends you make when you first get settled are not the most fascinating and caring people you can imagine, it is very difficult to break out and join a new group or even to become really close to just one person at another college.

People do it, of course, but they are either uncommonly outgoing or involved in some of a few organizations that foster cross-college interaction.

It is rare to see two people becoming friends just by having a class together, where students tend to come in, take notes and leave, unless they have friends from their college to sit with.

Parties are almost as difficult; people come with their college friends and leave with the same ones, and let's face it, the typical Rice student does not have the effervescent social skills, or at least does not use them, to regularly meet new people at parties.

Even if this feat is accomplished, the sheer inconvenience of maintaining a friendship with someone at another college, who has his or her own set of friends, makes this new relationship a short one.

The Student Center has not succeeded in bringing people together, and the campus-wide dances, now reduced to two, are strictly date affairs.

As for off-campus students having a home on campus, I as one of them would be much happier having many homes on campus, instead of only one that I often feel isolated from since I am not around for all the silly college gossip.

It is probably a good thing to have new freshmen live together, so that they can easily make friends as they make the college transi- tion.

But why lock people into the same people for three more years?

Why not allow them to choose their own college, after living in a sort of freshman college, as they do at Yale?

There people make friends easily when they arrive and can take or leave them the next year.

The casual friendships made along the way would undoubtedly give sophomores friends or at least acquaintences at every college to socialize with, as well as all the new people they could meet through them.

Colleges as automatic teams for sporting events, homes for thea- ter productions or party hosts could easily be modified to be dorms.

The shuffling of residents each year might even be better for variety in Beer-Bike teams or new ideas for parties.

There are so many cool people at Rice, I just wish I could meet them all.

Rice is such a tiny, tiny university already. What is the good in making it so much smaller?

Amy McKay

Jones '97

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the February 9, 1996 issue.

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