This piece originally appeared in the April 2023 print edition.
For many prospective Smithies, house community is a critical aspect to their college decision. With Smith’s distinct neighborhoods and decades-long house traditions, these established support systems help first-years feel less adrift in this new stage of their lives. But despite being touted as a hallmark of the Smith experience, the traditional house community isn’t available to all students. For residents of Parsons House, it’s what they’re trying to build. For residents of Talbot, it’s something they’ll need to fight to preserve.
For years, the status of Parsons House has been up in the air. Once planned to be released from the college’s inventory, Parsons operated as temporary housing for Washburn residents in early 2021 while their house was under renovation. The following year, as the ongoing pandemic skewed enrollment predictions, housing officials placed first-years in the now-unoccupied Parsons.
Alex Beardsley ’25, who lived in Parsons last year, put it bluntly. “They stuck 45 first-years and four woefully unprepared ResLife students into Parsons.”
Hannah Durrant, director of residence life at Smith, acknowledges that placing students in Parsons hadn’t been ResLife’s first choice.
“Our intent was that Parsons House would be offline for the 2021-22 academic year. […] And then we had the incoming class, students started rescinding going abroad, and we needed the beds,” said Durrant.
The transition was jarring for the first-years. According to Beardsley, Parsons residents felt burdened with building a community from scratch.
“Part of why I chose Smith was for its houses instead of dorms mentality,” they said. “I was worried I was going to miss out on a lot of Smith traditions by moving into a house that was effectively a clean slate.”
Beardsley said they knew they needed to step up to create the house community they wanted. They and their friend Raina Plevyak ’25 became co-house presidents in early 2021 and began trying to make their house feel more like a home. They created new traditions: hosting PowerPoint nights, creating a Pitbull shrine, and starting a house-wide game of hide and seek with Timmy, the small stuffed chicken they’d found in some leftover Washburn boxes. Soon, a Parsons House community started to form.
Beardsley hoped that year would lay the foundation for the kind of intergenerational house community on which Smith prides itself. But while the community was there, the physical house soon wouldn’t be.
Last spring, a few days after room draw, ResLife told residents that Parsons House would be closed for the 2022-23 academic year. Surveyors had been going through the house periodically throughout the year, initially to prepare for a short summer job that would update the house in keeping with Smith’s geothermal project. But what started as new windows turned into a faulty wall, which turned into structural insecurities.
Beardsley was still visibly upset when talking about Parsons’s closure. “We found out via email one week after we picked our rooms in room draw,” they recalled. “Naturally, there was some anger.”
According to Durrant, ResLife was not informed that the Parsons repairs would necessitate the house’s closure until two days after room draw. After tossing around different options for the house’s future, they realized Parsons would need to be closed for at least a year and summarily told residents. Still, Durrant admits, ResLife could have handled it better.
“I broke my cardinal rule,” they said. “My cardinal rule is that when sharing […] information you know is not necessarily going to be well received is to set up a time to meet with students. And I didn’t do that. So I shared the information, there was no plan to meet with the students, and they called me out on it. Appropriately so, called me out on it.”
Both last year and this year, Parsons has certainly risen to the challenge of creating an intentional community. They still receive a house budget from ResLife to maintain weekly house teas, host POCheese events and put on spring and winter weekends. Still, that’s not to say it’s been easy. For some former Parsons residents, the full-fledged communities in their new houses are a compelling reason to stay. For others, they worry that the Parsons that reopens won’t be the one they left behind. That’s because, when Parsons reopens in the spring of 2024, former Parsonists aren’t the only ones moving in: there will also be an influx of Talbot House residents.
On Jan. 26, ResLife announced that Talbot would be closed for the spring of 2024 to undergo renovations for the geothermal project. While Talbot’s house community has a much longer history than Parsons’, the prospect of a fully asynchronous semester is still daunting. Especially coming on the heels of a year of virtual house community during the pandemic, residents worry traditions will be lost.
“My year is the last year that experienced Talbot before the pandemic,” said Lucy Brandenburger, ’23, Talbot’s house president. “It feels like we have a lot of memories that haven’t really rebounded. I feel like campus as a whole has been struggling to come back after COVID, and there’s a lot less participation or excitement to participate since then.”
For a house that plans to be offline for half of next year, those problems are only exacerbated. It took rounds of persistent emailing to get residents to run for house council positions next year. It’s also unclear whether first-years will be placed in the house, which would break the four-year cycle of how students typically move through the housing system. While Durrant calls placing incoming first-years in Talbot ResLife’s “last possible option,” the house will need to be near-full to compensate for Parsons continuing to be offline.
“We will need to think creatively about how to fill those beds,” Durrant said.
But despite the uncertainty, Brandenburger believes Talbot will get through. Though she graduates in the spring, Brandenburger has spent her last semester recording and documenting, ensuring the incoming house council has everything they need to make the best of their situation. Talbot also has Parson’s community model to mimic in this uncertain time.
“They’ve made a really big effort to keep their house community,” Brandenburger says. “People have to commit to wanting that community. I don’t think it’ll work if people don’t. I don’t think people can want it without doing the work to have it.”
By the time Parsons House reopens, residents will have been putting in the work, in person and virtual, through an unimaginable set of obstacles, for three years.
“Not everyone would have fought as hard for a house community as some of us did,” Beardsley recalls. “It very well could have been ResLife’s worst experiment — not to say it was a good one! Don’t do it again. But thankfully, there were some really dedicated people that were there making it happen.”
While opening their doors to a slew of displaced Talbot residents will undoubtedly be strange, Beardsley knows the community they’ve spent so long building will still be there — and they’re excited to share it with the rest of Smith.
