Next year, the University administration plans to expand its controversial “First Year Experience” program, ensuring (if not forcing) that nearly all freshmen from Fall 2008 onwards live in all-freshmen dormitories. Crabtree, Mary Lyon, Knowlton, Cance and John Adams will be made freshmen-only dorms, in addition to half of Orchard Hill, Kennedy, Van Meter and Butterfield.

Now, I live in an all-freshman hall in Orchard Hill, so I think I know how the First Year Experience actually works. While it may do the trick for some people, I honestly think freshmen need the choice to live in mixed-age housing. Besides, we’ve already heard the real reasons for this move: once again the administration makes a rather bone-headed move to isolate poor, innocent children from the evils of alcohol, sex and anything that might interrupt our vital improvement of the school’s U.S. News ranking.

So rather than berate the administration, I’m going to try and make a positive point about why freshmen should have the opportunity to live with upperclassmen. For example, if we lived in a mixed-age dorm, someone would probably bother to tell the guys across the hall from me to, at some point, stop playing Assassin’s Creed and go to sleep. Someone would have explained to me how to read a PVTA schedule. We freshmen could socialize with upperclassmen and learn how to act more maturely. Instead, we’ve gotten an RA and peer mentors whose official position keeps us from becoming too close to them. Heck, I’ve only ever seen one of my peer mentors a couple of times in a whole semester.

I, for one, don’t want to live with upperclassmen who I have to look up at because the school has put them on a pedestal. I want to meet upperclassmen with whom I can actually spend time, and I don’t see why I should have to seek them out at parties or in a fraternity.

So go on UMass, expand the RAP and TAP programs until every conceivable major or academic interest has its own housing hall for its own freshmen geeks. Turn entire buildings previously known for their alcoholic exploits into freshman-only buildings where students pay slightly more for alcohol than they did before and have nobody to tell them how much is too much.

Actually, instead of expanding just freshman housing, why not allow Commonwealth College learning communities and similar programs to include upperclassmen who might actually want quiet hours enforced? Several of my friends and I would be glad for a place where we could study without disturbance, especially as we go into the later years of our science and engineering majors. Why should only freshman receive the privilege of quiet time for sleep and study especially when they need it the least?

And for those who want the “real college experience” of living with upperclassmen who actually know their way around campus and occasionally drink, let them elect to live in mixed-residence halls. Sure, they will learn to drink and party and do all those other “college-kid” things. Earth to the administration: they will learn that anyway. I have. You don’t have to learn those things from people with whom you live.

I’ve got a whole alternate set of friends with whom I party and who’ve taught me how to handle myself responsibly in such situations (among other things). This natural passing of knowledge from upperclassman to freshman allows them to slowly become upperclassmen and, in turn, pass the essential knowledge to a new generation of freshman. I’ll never receive that kind of folk wisdom (for example, about which dining commons serve the best food) from my parents or professors. I receive it from more experienced students.

How about instead of just trying to suppress students’ fun, the administration does something nice for us for once and simply expands the housing options available to everyone? Students in tough majors would appreciate housing that facilitates studying, and they could probably even create options for students who share extracurricular interests like band, writing or athletics. Such programs would really allow freshmen to make friends they would keep for their entire college career, rather than simply meet other students taking the same major. I found out last semester that RAP and TAP classes aren’t usually in your building when your building only has two classrooms, anyway.

Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].