We talked about this architecture dispute here yesterday, but I'm blogging again because of the crucial argument in favor of "Charlie's vision" that was missing from the CNN article I used for that piece. That is: The student's interest in having a room of one's own, rather than the usual college experience of a roommate. I'd thought the vision was more about forcing people out into common areas, but now I'm seeing it's also about having true privacy when you are in your private space.
A crucial factor might be whether the room is truly soundproof. Let's assume it is, that when you're in your little space you've got full personal privacy. Now answer the survey:
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Depends on the roommate. My first roommate became an alcoholic in the first semester, not easy to live with in a small room with two desks and a bunk bed.
To me, going to college and staying in a dorm is becoming part of a new group.
Making new friends and connections; people you will know who can be assets in your life journey after college.
I never had the 'live on campus' experience, but my wife and most friends did, and it has been invaluable to their careers.
You might as well learn via Zoom if you're going to be holed up in your single room...
It's called solitary confinement in prison.
One isn't holed up or confined except by choice in this dorm plan. Now, perhaps one can believe that college students shouldn't be given the privacy of their own bedroom because they might become hermits. There is probably some value in having to deal more intimately with a complete stranger for a year or two, but I don't think this should be forced on such students if it isn't a financial necessity.
I would have preferred a private room without a window for lots of reasons based on my own experiences in dorm-life. I am surprised that my position isn't more heavily supported in the vote totals right now, but that is also ok.
There is nothing that says you have to be alone in that windowless bedroom, if you catch my drift.
in 1980 (my freshman year at Iowa State), they were so over crowded, that they were putting 3 freshmen into each dorm. Our room (Wilson Hall, TRA) was 12'X13'
That's 156 sq ft per man. There was room for 1 bed, 1 bunkbed, 3 desks; 2 closets.
There were skinny windows, that looked out at the parking lot.
It Sucked.
As i recall (from having to repay my folks), it cost $1,326 a semester. Room/Board/Tuition
Now i think Iowa State has luxury accommodations, including a bathroom for every room
I wonder if the price went up?
They promised you a pod. You're going to get a pod.
And like it.
I couldn't decide how to vote, so I didn't, because each has choice definite pros and cons. A whole lot of it depends on just who the roommate is.
I liked my roommates.
I choose a room with a window and no roommate.
Yes, I know that wasn't one of the choices in the poll and also not part of Charlie's vision but I don't know why it couldn't be. Unless Charlie's trying to teach the lesson of sacrifice, that you can only have something you want if you give up something else you want first. That's the University's choice here, it can have Charlie's money but it has to give up its own plans and adopt his to get it.
You win, Ann. Except you left out the best option: A room with a window and no roommate.
You win, Ann. Except you left out the best option: A room with a window and no roommate.
Like Joe Smith, I never had a "live on campus" experience. So, my room had a window and no roommate. Not an option in the poll.
I love the idea of a billionaire with multiple mansions and a retired law professor living in a large house paid for by taxpayers telling students to choose between a window and a room mate and a prison cell with privacy.
We are just trying to help!
It's a bit rich for a bunch of professional architects to complain that something is an experiment or unliveable. Maybe these architects aren't the one's to blame for modern architecture, but I'd like to see evidence they've called out their own profession and learned the lessons of modern architecture's horrific anti-human designs before I take their criticism seriously. I am, if anything, inclined to ascribe less weight to a professional architect's opinions on liveability than I am to those of a random person on the street. Or a billionaire with no architectural training.
All that said, I don't hugely mind the prospect of a windowless room so long as it is well ventilated and otherwise comfortable. Weren't staterooms on the old ocean liners sometimes windowless? But the floorplans I've seen don't look particularly appealing (there's a somewhat bleak, dystopian feel to a huge grid of identical corridors, even in large apartment buildings and hotels), and if I were the one spending hundreds of millions I'd probably have tried to vary the design somewhat, with suites of different sizes and layouts, even if the constraint were still that every bedroom be windowless.
In 4 years I had 2, 1, 3 and 2 to a room and didn't notice any difference.
Which is better for the student, isolating oneself in a windowless room or learning to get along with other people in a room that's connected to the larger world?
Remember that this is living space for a four-month term, and you're spending most of your waking hours outside the room.
No big deal except for the entitled.
cut the number of students by half, give everyone single room with a window. It'd be a pure win:
- lower student debt
- less crazy at the university
- higher level of teaching
- no making people crazy through weird expected effects of putting them in the windowless rooms
remember to have trees visible through the windows.
There seems to be an almost even split. Why not build a place like this so that those who would prefer privacy and no view can enjoy that option. One rule for the lion and the lamb is oppression. Ditto for moles and hawks.....I've stayed in places with crappy views. It's surprising how much a green view and birds chirping can improve your mood. But that was before HDTV and streaming services.
I picked the window. Having roommates didn’t bother me in college. I bothered them, though—I was such a slob back then!
For 3 2/3 years of boarding school I slept in a cubicle with curtain. Can see in scene in 3 Men and a Little Lady. Shared room with same guy for 3 years in college. Neither of us had much of a romantic life so fine.
How to answer the question? It might depend on who the roommate is.
I suspect that at least 90% of the time students spend in their rooms involves using a computer, using a phone, or using the bed. A window might not make much difference to a modern student.
My grand daughter at U of Alabama has a sitting room and a bedroom in her dorm room. I think she shares a bathroom with one suite mate. Windows included.
Started college in 1965. Case Tech. We had 6-person suites and everyone had his own room--with a window.
The traditional way of providing light in college dorms is the quadrangle. By building a relatively thin set of buildings around a central courtyard, both the inside and outside rooms have windows. Obviously, some rooms could have windows in a fat dorm building, but none of them having windows solves the problem of how to allocate them. But quadrangles take up more land per student than Munger’s fat building, and probably cost more per student to build since proportionally more roof and outer walls are needed.
As to the single bedroom problem, students can often figure this out for themselves. I lived in a 4 person suite with 3 bedrooms, and a 3 person suite with 2 bedrooms,. In both cases, the problem was solved by someone sleeping in the suite’s common room. I was able to get out of sleeping in the common or double-bunked room in both cases by following my father’s advice, getting there first and claiming the best room. Oh, yes, we will switch rooms at the semester break I agreed, but in both cases that did not come to pass.
I see that Iowa Western Community College solves this problem by charging $4,000 a semester for a single and $2,000 per semester for a double. At a shared rental house in Ann Arbor, I paid less and took the shitty room.
The Munger Residences at the University of Michigan get pretty good reviews.
There is a Munger Hall in the campus of the University of Michigan. I think Charlie Munger went to Michigan Law School.
The Munger graduate housing (a nice conventional building) is built partly on the previous site of Althouse’s old employer, Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers.
I chose the 'bedroom with no window' option because students have weird hours. I may want to catch up on my sleep during a bright sunny day. My roommate might have early morning classes and I might have evening classes - possibly waking me up when I don't want to. More doable in a room with no windows. There would be plenty of rooms with windows available campus wide in study areas and the library. Having a consistently dark room to retreat to when sleep was needed is a plus.
Perhaps Dark Academia is a response to this type of planning.
I am Laslo.
Frosh year, I shared a double with a roommate, Jeff Bloom. I had a single for sophmore and junior years and lived off campus for senior year. The dorm I lived in was called a Fleming House. We had common shower/toilets, a common area and a dining room where some of the students did the serving. It was a good social environment.
Years later, I took my wife to see the old dorm during a reunion weekend. Her biggest impression was the stink of the house, like a gym. I never noticed the stink, since my sense of smell was nearly nonexistent back then. It's improved somewhat, and I can actually smell the coffee now.
I shared a bedroom with my sister the entire time I was growing up. Two of the three roommates I had in dorm life became like sisters to me. I appreciate having sisters. I also like windows.
My doctoral program had windowless rooms for grad student offices. Given the demands of grad school in those days, one almost spent more time there than at their apartments.
The walls were cinderblock that they did not allow us to paint. The campus was originally built as an example of Brutalist architecture in the 60's by Walter Netsch. The place was so depressing that it motivated you to get your work done so you could graduate as quickly as possible.
They have been transforming the campus since the 80's because of the depressing original design.
No one seems prepared to address the critical question: how in the Hell does this pass fire codes?
A billionaire with more dollars than sense, as it were.
Nothing new here.
My first roommate became an alcoholic in the first semester
I just cannot imagine how this happened!!
- Krumhorn
If you get lucky, your assigned (total stranger) roommate finds you boring and goes to
stay elsewhere, finally moving all her stuff after about six weeks. I then decide a dorm room is for sleeping from 11 pm to 7 pm. Studying in library stacks made a huge difference while I tried to decide whether to stay in Civil Engineering. I aggressively met other girl engineering
/tech majors. I toughened up and had a primary roommate who was out every other semester for what was then called
Coop Education. I took whoever I was assigned. Had great time getting to know English / Art majors and their friends.
So bottom line-roommates are important for a life experience
If you get lucky, your assigned (total stranger) roommate finds you boring and goes to
stay elsewhere, finally moving all her stuff after about six weeks. I then decide a dorm room is for sleeping from 11 pm to 7 pm. Studying in library stacks made a huge difference while I tried to decide whether to stay in Civil Engineering. I aggressively met other girl engineering
/tech majors. I toughened up and had a primary roommate who was out every other semester for what was then called
Coop Education. I took whoever I was assigned. Had great time getting to know English / Art majors and their friends.
So bottom line-roommates are important for a life experience
No one who's ever been kicked out of a dorm room until 2am so the roommate can have sex in private would choose the "window but with a roommate" option.
One year I had a gay music major as a roommate.
Needless to say, I vote windowless.
If it's hot inside, I want to open a window. A simple thing like no AC, which in this day and age happens often, could mean nights of misery without a window. I recall staying in a UK hotel with no AC during a heat wave. They literally sealed the windows shut, "for safety". It was over 100F in my room. No fan. Miserable. Fortunately, I'm a good American who despite UK knife laws packed a Leatherman, and removed the screws they put in place to lock the window. No window = hell.
How much is the rent for these jail cells?
Fire fire burning bright
In the dorm room late at night
What erred mortal hand or eye
Dared frame thy seared vicinity?
Big Mike: Yes! There's no way in tarnation that any building can contain 4500 students, only 6% of whom have windows. (And what about that class divide, incidentally?) I don't think there's anyplace in this country where that would be remotely legal. Cruise ships can get away with this b/c there are long corridors everywhere. And they are, um, totally surrounded by water. And not on dry land. The rules are different.
Like several people here, I vote for the choice Ann didn't give us: Single room, with window. That's largely because I lived in one for two years at Cal. It was in Stern Hall (women's dorm), and on the second floor, so not easy to get in the window from outside, so I left it open much of the time, with a long semi-transparent ivory curtain over it. The room was small, but comfortable and extremely tidy. I didn't have much in the way of clothes, but I did rent a mini-fridge and had a small bookcase, also a bunch of CDs. I could practice violin in there, listen to music, read, use the computer. Seemed practically ideal to me.
My first year I had roommates, who were a mixed bag. First semester was OK; second semester I moved, to what we all called "Dwight/Derby" but was officially "Clark Kerr Campus," after a previous university President. (Before that, IIRC, it housed a school for the deaf.) A lovely dorm, most rooms on the first floor, singles and doubles and suites, all in the faux-Southwestern style that dominates the Stanford campus (adobe, red tile roofs, &c.) My roommate there was a bit nightmarish. She wanted the temperature at least ten degrees higher than I did. She did long athletic routines every morning to the accompaniment of a boom-box. (I had a boom-box, too, but suffice it to say that hers had radically different music on it from mine; also, I had headphones, and used them.) And she used the phone, whose bills were in my name. She was always calling her SoCal parents, but invariably collect -- until the last month when she figured she could get away with it and started calling them direct, looking to foist the bill on to me.
She left the day before the bill arrived, with $200 or so of her calls on it. It got straightened out, but not before my Dad gave her Dad a very long and detailed talking-to. Anyway, after that I really, really wanted a single room, and I got one. Senior year, I was out of Stern and in what the Brits call a bed-sit way up in the Berkeley hills. That was also just me, with a window, and the couple offering it and I mostly stayed out of one another's way. But I was allowed use of the kitchen when they were out of it, and cooked and made coffee occasionally.
in the words of a Famous Architect who blows up his own building
“It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
- HOWARD ROARK’S COURTROOM SPEECH – THE FOUNTAINHEAD
-----------------
could Munger be an Roark aficianado ? privacy + separated from others
Munger has apparently never heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.
That design will have people committing suicide on a regular basis
Maynard said...
My doctoral program had windowless rooms for grad student offices. Given the demands of grad school in those days, one almost spent more time there than at their apartments.
So did mine. But since I could buy a better computer than the one they could provide me, I mostly worked in my apartment, that did have a window
Aircraft carriers hold thousands. Only the CO has a stateroom with a view. The XO and an embarked Flag will have single rooms.
Everyone else gets from 1 to 98 roommates.
Living with a roommate teaches about dealing with others and is an important part of the college experience.
Also penny locking was common in my dorm.
I'm blogging again because of the crucial argument (against CNN’s conclusion) was missing from the CNN article.
Generally true for every CNN article.
Still friends with my freshman year roommate over a half century ago. They tried to put people with similar limes together, and we both were avid skiers. Didn’t work for his best friend across the hall - he was put with another pre-med, who, because of his humor impairment, became the butt of jokes on our hall of 33. Besides our RA, the only singles went to complete antisocials. Both my roommate, his best friend from home, and I joined the same fraternity. Sophomore year, we switched roommates, as the two of them moved into the fraternity house, and I got the humor impaired pre-med. it wasn’t good, but then I met the girl who would be my GF for the next 3 years, and her roommate unofficially moved off campus, with a guy a couple weeks in. So, I ultimately found myself the only guy living in the freshman women’s dorm. Then, early the next semester, one of the few singles in the fraternity house opened up, and I kept it for the next 2 1/2 years. Not only did it have a window, and I put a sofa outside it, where we could hang out and do the sort of things that Boomers did in college, that are just now becoming legal. Or I should clarify, that the two of us lived there, though she always had an official female dorm roommate, and she would drop by a couple times a week. Best type of roommate, except for when my fraternity brothers tried (unsuccessfully) to pick her up wiener we had a fight.
I thought I was voting for a room with a window and no roommate, so don't count my vote.
Charlie Munger is 98 and still Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and he looks very much like previous generations of Berkshires and Hathaways would have looked, if there were any. Like Warren Buffett, Munger's family was in Omaha politics, and young Charlie worked in Warren's grandfather's store.
Munger is the tenth richest person in the world, so his word carries a lot of weight. I would like the guy much more if he were just a reclusive mung bean tycoon.
Ann says: The student's interest in having a room of one's own, rather than the usual college experience of a roommate. I'd thought the vision was more about forcing people out into common areas, but now I'm seeing it's also about having true privacy when you are in your private space.
I made this point in my comment for the earlier article on this subject where I said:And the design has some good ideas. Food, bed, plenty of common space and a place for a proper assignation. What more does a college student need?
Spending four years living with my parents while going to college, with nothing more that I could call my own than a bed and some place in which to put what little stuff I had, I lived the experience of no private space – anywhere. For those ( Oh ye privileged elite ) who were not so burdened while doing their college years under such a handicap this may not have much meaning; but it is a big thing.
Sacrificing a window is such a small price to pay.
I was an adult for God’s sake! I had needs!
A room with a window and a roommate = two windows. But I had a good roommate in college.
The survey is a false choice fallacy.
The real choice is between a modest sized room with a roommate and a normal window, and a smaller single-occupancy room with a smaller window. Just cut a typical dorm room in half lengthwise. You don't have to get rid of all windows in all rooms to give everyone a single-occupancy room.
"Best type of roommate, except for when my fraternity brothers tried (unsuccessfully) to pick her up wiener we had a fight."
Best autocorrect of the day.
On the campus (large state University) near my home, all of the new dorm rooms are set up to have a 4 person suite with a common area (living and kitchen) that has large windows, and 4 windowless bedrooms (2 windowless baths).
The question is, are you allowed to leave?
Somrimes, you need a space (oh how I know hate that word) to come back to and consolidate events and thoughts on your own terms.
Gerda Sprinchorn said...
The survey is a false choice fallacy.
The real choice is between a modest sized room with a roommate and a normal window, and a smaller single-occupancy room with a smaller window. Just cut a typical dorm room in half lengthwise. You don't have to get rid of all windows in all rooms to give everyone a single-occupancy room.
He's pushing for a 4300 room "dorm building", if each one is going to be a single.
The cost difference between a two room wide rectangle capable of holding 4300 rooms, and a more square shaped building with 93% of the rooms not on a wall, is probably at least 2 - 3 times as much as the square.
Now, clearly the better choice is to build 7 ~600 person dorms. It's not like they have no space, and it's a State university, so they don't have to pay property taxes on it.
But Munger wants his one big dick, I mean building
The windowless pod will prepare the student for his future as a fuel cell in the Matrix.
Or as a corporate employee in a cubicle.
That may work for people who are already extraverted and outgoing. The lonely, awkward, and unhappy will simply remain in their cells, until the authorities have to break through the doors with axes.
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