Too Much, Too Soon

The Masters' recent request that graduate students be allowed to move into rooms made vacant by the construction of Leverett towers is the logical solution to a somewhat unexpected problem. If contributors to the Program had realized that by the spring of 1959 the College would be wondering what to do with its newly acquired rooming space, they might have been slightly amused at the pleas for more rooms. But what the Masters have actually proposed is a solution to a temporary problem, and it should be considered as such.

The proposal is appealing from the viewpoint of House life, for it balances the exclusive representation of the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences with the less academic, professional fields, such as medicine, business and law. But, more important, it is an economical solution to what could be an unpleasant financial problem. Both of the alternates--deconversion of overcrowded suites by putting students into the vacated rooms, and use of the empty rooms for non-resident tutors' offices--would force the present number of students to pay for a larger number of rooms--presumably through a sizable increase in room rents, and reduction of rent adjustment.

But while the Masters' suggestion is highly satisfactory as the answer to an immediate problem, it should not be adopted as a permanent solution without very careful thought. Certainly, for example, the College should abolish forced commuting before moving in graduates, and it should never bring back the forced commuter system just to maintain some quota of graduate students in the Houses.

Moreover, while it is clear that the rooms emptied by the towers will not be filled by the normal flow of Freshmen unless '63 is radically larger than this year's Freshman class, this does not mean that the new space supplied by the Program should not be filled with undergraduates in the long run. Certainly a policy of expansion is implied in the Program's provision for three new Houses.

The question of whether or not graduate students should live in the Houses instead of undergraduates is not, however, the issue. The proposal which the Masters have made is a temporary way of supplying people to live in the Houses in lieu of non-existent undergraduates. Their suggestion is economically sound--it costs nothing and pays its own way. It worked to the benefit of the Houses in the 1930's; there is no reason why it should not do so again.