History
Caltech established the House System in 1931, disbanding the existing fraternities and recasting them as Blacker House, Dabney House, Fleming House and Ricketts House, now known as the South Houses. The fraternities were as follows:
- Blacker: Phi Alpha Rho, also known as Pharo
- Dabney: Gamma Sigma
- Fleming: Sigma Alpha Pi and Pi Alpha Tau
- Ricketts: Kappa Gamma, also known as Gnome
Expanding student population was accommodated in 1960 with the North Houses: Lloyd House, Page House, and Ruddock House.
A new state-of-the-art residential facility named Avery House, was opened in 1996, touted as a facility that allowed undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty to not only mingle, but live together. As a result, Avery was not initially considered part of the House System, and freshmen were not allowed to live there. However, in the 2003–2004 school year, the Avery Council (the student government of Avery House) campaigned for Avery to participate in Rotation and take freshmen. This change was opposed by the Caltech undergraduate student body by a five-to-one margin, but the Faculty Board voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. Beginning in the 2005–2006 school year, freshmen began to rotate into Avery, changing its status from an undergraduate housing option to a fully represented House.
Also in 2005, work began on a major renovation project for the aging South Houses, whose residents were relocated to a temporary modular housing complex. The renovations were completed at the beginning of the 2007 calendar year. Students moved back into the South Houses on 15 December 2006, though construction continued through the beginning of 2007.
Like most of the buildings on campus, Avery House and the South Houses are in California Mission style, and resemble cloistered monasteries with enclosed courtyards; the North Houses are of Modern design.
Read more about this topic: House System At The California Institute Of Technology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)