Floating Through The Housing Squeeze

It hardly seems necessary to renumerate the inconveniences caused by this fall's housing crisis. But President Bok's move last week toward an increase of 300 in the undergraduate population over the next four years makes it crucial to assess the current system of placing and accomodating students in the College.

The immediate lesson to be learned from the difficulties of the past three weeks is that studies should be undertaken now to determine ways of avoiding confusion in future housing assignments.

This fall's housing debacle resulted from a combination of factors, many of which can be eliminated. Dean Epps's office--which has ultimate responsibility for undergraduate housing--fell victim to a statistical reverse this year that was almost impossible to forsee. However, beyond the statistics, there has been an obvious lack of planning in assigning unrealistic numbers of students to a few Houses, in establishing guidelines for the interchange between Radcliffe and the Houses, and in converting rooms from doubles to singles, from triples to doubles and the like.

In fairness, statistics played havoc with this year's housing assignments. The experience of the past four years had shown two trends to be dominant: more students were taking leaves of absence, thereby opening up vacancies in the Houses as each academic year progressed, and, students taking leaves of absence tended to go to school during the fall semester and take the spring term off, thereby extending the total number of years they spent here.

To compensate for these twin tendencies, Epps decided to overload the Houses at the beginning of this academic year, and then to shuffle people during the first few weeks as students took leaves of absence. If need be, this overload would continue throughout the first term until the spring exodus began. The intended result was a brief period of inconvenience to a few, the eventual accomodation of all, and a body in every bed at Harvard.

Trends can be fickle, however. Not only did fewer people decide to take leaves this year, but others who had been on extended leaves--constituting absences of as long as six years in some cases-unexpectedly returned to Harvard in droves. Coupled with the emerging trend toward fall-term residency, this left Epps not only with a body in every bed, but a few in guest suites, ladies' bathrooms and music practice rooms as well. At the outset, Adams House had 40 more people than it could accomodate. Dunster House had 30 floaters, and every other House was either overcrowded or full.

It would be easy to pass off this disproportionate overload as the result of bad luck in a game of statistical roulette. But there are more complex, and less acceptable explanations. In some Houses, House secretaries were charged with the task of accomodating more people than they possibly had room for. Whether it was because of poor communication between the Houses and Epps's office, or because of unresponsiveness from Epps's office to the protests of House secretaries when unreasonable numbers of students were assigned to particular Houses, the fact remains that nothing substantial was done to avert an obvious crisis situation that was developing throughout the summer. No shuffling of upperclassmen, no reassignment of incoming sophomores was done during the summer months when it should have been done.

The roots of this fall's problems go back even further, though. The myth of the Harvard House system--repeatedly espoused as the construction of Mather House lagged behind schedule--was that when all the Houses were built, every junior and senior would have his or her own bedroom, and that suites of juniors and seniors would each have a living room. The extension of the ideal was that sophomores would be similarly accomodated in reasonable proportions, and that ideal did not seem so far-fetched last spring when half of Mather House was found to be empty (or occupied by students from MIT, BU, or the unattached from Twin Falls, Idaho--none of whom had any Harvard affiliation). It was this overabundance of room that led Epps to dedicate himself, in the interest of solvency for a Housing system that lost $700,000 in 1970-71, to "filling every bed at Harvard." His first step was to make it more difficult for juniors and seniors to move off campus, and until the onslaught of bodies this fall, most Houses were well below their off-campus quotas.

The next move was to open wide the interchange between the Houses and Radcliffe, making the switch more attractive to women by offering them rooms in the House of their choice. Suddenly, too, there was a waiting list of men wanting to move to Radcliffe. But while this had the desired effect of improving the male-female ratios in the Houses and of filling the vacancies that had surfaced there, it also created a problem which would only become apparent later. Many of the women who moved to Harvard were juniors and seniors; they were accomodated first when housing assignments were made, usually in deconverted rooms and often before people already living in the Houses were accomodated. At the same time, Harvard men taking their places at Radcliffe were more evenly distributed among the sophomore, junior and senior classes; the sophomores in some cases were placed in deconverted singles at Radcliffe, while it is probable they would have been placed with, say, two roommates in a converted double in one of the Houses.

The end result was that fewer people were able to move off campus (which is desirable in light of the overcrowded Cambridge housing market), and, in the massive shuffling of people from Harvard to Radcliffe and back, a substantial amount of room was unwisely distributed. In many cases those who suffered most were people who did not move at all, and did not want to move. A large percentage of the floaters this fall were (or still are) people who lived in the Houses last year and did not apply for rooms with roommates last spring. They should have been accomodated long ago, before people transfering into the Houses and before incoming sophomores. Yet they were left "floating" throughout the summer and into the beginning of the school year. Now it is these people who are being coerced, by the prospect of being squeezed out of a private bedroom in their own House, into moving permanently to another House or to Radcliffe, or moving off campus for half or all of this year. At the same time, sophomores who applied singly to the same House are placed with juniors in true doubles.

There is one thing which emerges time and again in rehashing the housing difficulties of the past three weeks: the present administration of the housing system is inherently weak. In large part, this weakness lies in the fact that the dean of Students and eight House secretaries are responsible for placing over 4000 people in a barely adequate Housing system. It is not clear that they are experienced enough in housing to handle large movements of people each year, much less the infusion of 300 more into the system over the next four years. Nor is it clear that they should have to bear this responsibility. With all its resources, Harvard must be able to do a better job of planning in housing undergraduates, with professional assistance if necessary, than it did this year. The unenviable task of smoothing out the housing situation and erasing its deficit will probably fall to Stephen S.J. Hall, vice president for Administration, in President Bok's overall scheme. But while the House secretaries can be of assistance in accomodating students in the future, they should not have administrative responsibilities. After all, the House secretaries--and the Dean of Students for that matter--must have better and more useful things to do than develop ulcers over rooming assignments.