To the Editor:

In the past few weeks, I have read in The Hustler about the overall positive response to The Commons. I believe that the perception of such a popular positive assessment of The Commons is misguided and inaccurate. Certainly, there must be people who agree with me that The Commons have been lacking in many regards, as I will explain below.

The Commons’ purported goal is to facilitate bonding among the freshman class at Vanderbilt. To achieve this goal, almost every single student in the freshman class is assigned to a double room. In this way, people who are not outgoing, like me, can be paired with people who think of their room (and mine) as a party headquarters. This all-doubles design is clearly intentional, as there are no singles except those forced by building planning considerations, even in the newest dorm, Hank Ingram. Clearly, the committee who planned The Commons was under the misguided impression that, no matter how large the differences, randomly assigned roommates would bond.

In a similar vein, the attempt to create house identity has miserably failed. Each house was assigned a faculty Head of House, a randomly selected group of students and uniform T-shirts with their team color and team animal (not really). To increase the house identity, houses participated in Community Creed rites (Gillette House just signed the thing and played games; I feel sorry for those who had to write a song about “Scholarship”). Further, there was also scheduled to be the Commons Cup, which would answer the ages-old question of whether the students randomly assigned to be Silver Snakes — excuse me — Gillette Hall residents were better than the rest of the freshman class. Fortunately, I have heard nothing about this Cup, which means that it was probably deep-sixed for everyone’s good.

I am also disappointed in that VUcept is not changing for next year, because it was another failed bonding exercise. The exercises in VUcept reminded me of middle school (and not in a good way); those exercises included such important activities as painting pumpkins to demonstrate stereotypes, talking about how to balance academics and (my non-existent) social life, and a relay race that involved the actual use of GPS receivers.

I don’t blame the VUceptors (as they did the best they could with the curriculum); rather, I blame the curriculum and whoever thought of the brilliant idea of putting 20 unrelated students in a room on a Tuesday on which they would not otherwise have late afternoon classes and seeing who comes out alive, or rather, seeing them bond together. (Which I must say was a success, as by the end of VUcept, I knew the names of three of the 20 VUceptees in my group.)

In all, to me, the bonding experience promoted by the creation of The Commons appears to be a miserable failure. While I do see how some could appreciate the experience, I just cannot see how the reviews could be overwhelmingly positive, as The Hustler implies.

Greg Gauthier
First-year student
College of Arts and Science