Archived Edition: April 25, 2007 | Back to Current	Sep 09, 2010

The more the merrier
Michael Prigoff

As an alumnus from the 70s (and the parent of a current Williams student) who very much enjoyed the residential house system of my era, I have watched the development of the William Housing System with great interest. When the final proposal was first unveiled, I instinctively thought that there were too few clusters, and that each cluster had too many student-members. I understood why the number four was chosen, given the important role that eating together plays in building communities on campus, but having over 400 students in each cluster just seemed, to me at least, to be too large to work well. It certainly was a far cry from the house system of my time at Williams, with 18 residential houses with approximately 50 members each, and a healthy sense of community in virtually every one.

I may be wrong, looking at the campus today from a distant, somewhat filtered, perspective, but I sense that the clusters have not achieved the primary goal of developing social communities that give students a “home” within the larger College. There are many potential indicators of this, including widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, increased vandalism, etc. Of course, there are probably many responsible factors, but I think that one of the most significant is the size of each cluster.

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which supports this theory. Gladwell refers to the “Rule of 150,” which posits that humans can only effectively socialize with groups of 150 or less, and cites research by Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist. Dunbar has found that the maximum group size of primates is correlated with the ratio of the neocortex to the size of the brain, and has developed an equation, which for humans results in 147.8, or roughly 150. This number corresponds to numerous historical examples, from average size of multiple hunter-gatherer groups in Australia and Greenland, the size of functional fighting units in military organizations, Hutterite agricultural colonies, to the factories of Gore Associates (makers of Gore-Tex fabric, among other things). As Dunbar puts it:

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

See, R.I.M. Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469-93.

For centuries, the Hutterites have been further dividing their communities in order to maintain a maximum of 150 members. Gore Associates, by trial and error, has found that 150 people is the ideal size for each of their factories, and so only builds them with 150 parking spaces. Accordingly, they know when it is time to build a new one!

If Dunbar is correct, that would suggest that a strong sense of social community in the clusters as currently constituted will be very hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

Can Williams do better? Why not? Instead of four clusters of 400 students, why couldn’t there be 11 with 145 members each? The dining situation could be handled the same way it was in the ’70’s in the Greylock Dining Hall, with 3 or 4 seating areas assigned to houses in each of the dining halls. A greater number of clusters would also allow for more contiguous grouping of residences in each cluster. If the clusters were carefully selected to assure relative equality of decent room choices (which actually might be easier with more clusters rather than fewer), I’d be willing to bet that they would more quickly develop into effective social communities.

There would be no additional cost over the present system. The only objection that I can conceive is one that I believe was floated during the genesis of the present system, i.e., that it would be harder to get sufficient student volunteers to serve as leaders of a greater number of clusters. Yet, this never was a problem under the residential house system, suggesting to me that better-functioning social units would likely generate the same interest that existed in my time, when house leaders naturally emerged.

I have no illusions that this idea will quickly be seized upon and implemented. However, after a few years of the present system, when the memory of the “free choice” era has passed from the collective consciousness of the student body, and when the goals of the current housing system still haven’t been realized, perhaps this issue will be revisited.



Michael L. Prigoff ’73 is an attorney in Closter, N.J.