Tuesday, February 28, 1995

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Background: Few = Few Quad, a set of West Campus dorms.
I've mentioned in a few other entries that there were a lot of controversial situations going on with the University during this semester. The biggest of them was probably the shift off all freshmen to East Campus, and finding housing space for all of the upperclassmen that would be displaced in the process.
While trying to tackle that situation (and several others), the Unversity decided to add one more to their plate. They felt that some living groups had needless control of specific housing areas on campus. Essentially, selective groups "possessed" some of the best housing on West, meaning that people could only live in "good" housing if they joined a selective group. The fix: kick all selective groups out of their current housing and have a lottery to decide where they would end up the next year.
This infuriated a number of living groups, and, in some cases, for good reason. One of the fraternities on campus had paid to install air-conditioning in all of the dorms in their quad, and were threatened with having to move to non-air-conditioned space. (They ended up getting to stay in the quad, but in a less-desirable location.) The Language and Arts dorms were built by donations explicitly to be those dorms, and the donors eventually had to step in and threaten the University to get them exempted from the lottery.
The worst side effect: a number of living groups were named for the building they were in. That next year, for example, Mirecourt wasn't in Mirecourt. You pretty much had to carry a map with you to figure out where anything was.
Anyway, the afternoon this cartoon ran, I was walking towards the Bryan Center and heard one guy describing this cartoon to his buddy and laughing. I'm telling you, moments like that were what made drawing cartoons so much fun, even with all of the frustrations.