Old news: Dickinson and Newing colleges are on their way out. They were the first 11 dorms built at Binghamton University; they’re old and dilapidated and it’s high time they were replaced with more comfortable buildings that (at the very least) meet fire code.

Soon it will be time for BU administrators to work with architects to design those replacements. And when they do, they’ll have to choose among suites, corridor-style doubles or some combination of the two.

Suites are all the rage now: students claim they want privacy, and the suite, with its included living room and bathroom, is definitely as close to private as a dorm can get without becoming an apartment. Suites are great for established groups of friends — upperclassmen who already know whom they want to live with but who aren’t ready to take the plunge into off-campus living.

But the new dorms will have to house freshmen. And for freshmen, privacy is a social death sentence.

Some of our staffers who have lived in suites for all their time at Binghamton are now beginning to regret not getting to live the corridor lifestyle. And we can sympathize. Corridors are where the “college experience” begins: doors are always open, people are always in one another’s rooms, and the halls — and even the bathrooms — are constantly abuzz with chatter.

College-in-the-Woods suites maintain some of that sociality — they’re smallish and the halls are narrow, the rooms close together. CIW (except for Mohawk) is a mix of suites and corridor-style doubles that provide a useful blend of privacy, living space and congregation spots.

So one might think that the social atmosphere cultivated in CIW’s Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca halls would have been a guiding principle in the design of Mountainview College, BU’s newest residential community. Instead, only the idea of suite-borne privacy carried over. The result: one look at Mountainview is enough to convince anyone that the community could have been built to prevent residents from socializing.

Look at that monolith at the top of campus: Mountainview’s rooms are huge. The hallways are almost wide enough to fit a whole Newing double but are devoid of any place to sit. Laundry rooms are in basements, and each floor has its own study lounge. The entire community’s architecture is reminiscent more of a hospital than of a student living space. The silent atmosphere of Mountainview is sad and sterile. Even the room doors come with no way to prop them open, and they’re too heavy to keep open without a cinderblock. You can theoretically watch an entire weekend fly by without ever leaving your suite. Who needs to leave when you have a huge suite and your own semiprivate bathroom?

Meanwhile, the dining hall and quad areas are enormous, airy and centrally-located. They, unlike the residence halls that surround them, seem to be geared specifically towards fostering interaction between students. It’s like planners were working with two irreconcilable sets of values, and the result is disheartening: the entire concept of “community” has been misappropriated. When there’s no spirit of conviviality flowing through the dorms, the residential community becomes merely a place to spend the time between classes, a soulless husk that produces few traditions and little camaraderie.

It seems, then, that designers for the next new campus dorms will have to look elsewhere for ideas. And there’s no shortage of them floating around. A September New York Times article highlighted Swarthmore College’s Alice Paul Hall, which combines new-wave architecture with old-school corridor-style living. Bedrooms are arranged for maximum hall traffic, the laundry room is next to the TV lounge, the bathroom has one entrance to foster conversation and the hallway has nooks where students can study and socialize, outside anybody’s bedroom or lounge. (In case our friends in BU’s Tuscarora or Couper office buildings want to read the Times article, Swarthmore posted a copy at swarthmore.edu/news/releases/05/nyt_paul_hall.html.)

Administrators now have the chance to shape both the face of Binghamton’s campus and the character of its student body. Let’s hope they forsake the architectural trends and flavors of the week, and instead take a lesson from successful communities elsewhere, new and old. Let’s build a place where we can really learn and grow, and kill BU’s student apathy where it lives.