Making Use of Mather

The Committee on Houses has wisely appointed a subcommittee to study the effect of the tenth House on undergraduate living conditions.

One principle should guide the deliberations: no student who now lives off-campus or wishes to do so should be forced to live in a House. So long as students are free to leave, the Houses will have an incentive to maintain themselves as the pleasant, genial dwellings they are generally known to be. As President Lowell wrote several decades ago, to permit students to rent apartments "has been thought wiser than to attach to the Houses any sense of compulsion or to make residence there other than a privilege."

The new House should be used to relieve overcrowding in the eight existing ones. The Houses now service one and a half times as many students as was originally intended. In Dunster House, for example, this means that 350 students live in the space designed for 234.

The University plans to bring the 100 undergraduates now living in Claverly back to the Houses proper. These men will occupy 100 of the 400 places in Mather House, leaving 300 places free for men from the other Houses. Since there are currently more than a thousand students living in converted suites, it is clear that Mather will not be the final answer to overcrowding, one more reason for the Committee on the Houses to support a policy of unrestricted off-campus living.

Any step in the direction of a one man, one bedroom policy is clearly desirable. Overcrowding provided the impetus for planning a new House; deconversion was--and remains--the one legitimate reason for building it.

Whatever deconversion Mather permits will make all the Houses that much more livable--and will allow Senior tutors, their staffs, and Faculty associates to spend more times with each student, to develop those personal relations which are the sine qua non of the House system.

The University has indicated that because of its complex budgeting procedures all the Houses, Mather included, will have to pay for themselves. The total upkeep of the Houses will have to be balanced by the rents collected from students. If, as is to be hoped, no one is forced back to the campus and the rooms are thus filled with men from other Houses, this position amounts to a demand for a raise in room rents.

The increased rates would probably amount to no more than $50 a year. That would work a hardship for some students, and ample provision should be made for scholarships and loans to cover the additional cost of going to school here.

But it is also possible that the University could find or raise the money necessary to keep rents down. Claverly, for example, might be used as a graduate dormitory. In any case, the University should not dismiss out-of-hand ideas that vary from its time-encrusted budgetary procedures.

It will be two years before the tenth House is opened, more than enough time for Administration and students to decide on the best way to use its potential.