THE FRESHMEN AND THE HOUSES

Dean Hanford's report, published elsewhere in today's CRIMSON on the housing of the Class of 1934 next year shows an undisputed progress toward a systematic operation of the House Plan. There will probably be sufficient room in the units for the entire class, which is a pleasant improvement over the difficulty met by the Classes of 1932 and 1933. The practice of consultations between the Freshmen and the faculty and upperclassmen will insure a completer understanding by the first-year men of the theory involved behind the Houses. Through the decision to allow the Freshmen to pick their fields of concentration before their Houses, the assignment of tutors can be more intelligently followed.

The report stresses the fact that dropped Freshmen will not be allowed to live in the Houses for two reasons: the prospect of exclusion will be an incentive for better work the first year; the dropped Freshmen will not be assigned to tutors and, "since the Houses are intimately associated with the tutorial plan", it is useless to include them.

The first reason will, of course, act only as a preventative and not as a solution of the problem; dropped Freshmen will remain as in the past. In the segregation of these men because of the tutorial system, the CRIMSON feels that there should be some consistency on this point. This year there are several examples of men living in Dunster whose tutors are in Lowell, or vice versa. While this may be explained on the grounds that the mechanism of the House Plan cannot be geared perfectly in one year, it is more difficult to understand the case, in the draw of the upperclassmen last month, of many men who applied and were refused admittance to the Houses where their tutors will be in residence. If the man in good standing is not to be with his tutor, it is unfair to discriminate against the dropped Freshman. Furthermore, this segregation of the black sheep is a refutation of the hitherto assumed, if idealistic theory that the Houses are to prove an intellectual stimulus because of their atmosphere and the grouping of student and teacher. Certainly the man most in need of this stimulus is the dropped Freshman.