The House System

"provides the possibility of close contact between people of different ages and interests and experience such as is offered by only a handful of other educational institutions in the world."

Zeph Stewart is a Professor of Greek and Latin and the Master of Lowell House.

THE HARVARD HOUSES were conceived by President Lowell some forty years ago as an attempt to check the disintegration of Harvard College. The steady growth of the College, and the graduate oriented diversity encouraged by President Eliot, had produced for some undergraduates a big and impersonal society in which it was easy to be lost and alone; for others it had increased and emphasized the separateness of cliques and interest groups; and teachers and students had little occasion now for contact either inside or outside the lecture room. There had been criticisms of the situation for some time, and suggestions for improving it. Charles Francis Adams is sometimes given credit for first mentioning establishment of smaller units more than a decade before the Houses became a reality. Certainly the direction of Lowell's thinking about undergraduate education made him ready to accept at once the proposals brought to him by Edward Harkness in 1928 after the latter's disappointment with the response at Yale. Legendary accounts of that interview undoubtedly reflect Lowell's feeling that this was exactly the right solution to the most pressing problem at Harvard; these new residential units were to provide new communities of social and educational experience for students and faculty alike: without interfering with the inevitable and desirable flowering of Harvard University as a graduate and research center, they were to give the undergraduate population the opportunities and advantages of a small college as well.

There was much early scepticism and some opposition. Julian Coolidge, the first Master of Lowell House, has noted as a straw in the wind that five professors refused the invitation to be among the first seven Masters. Many undergraduates chose not to move in. In the first decade of operation graduate students, especially those in the Law School, took rooms in the Houses. Lowell felt that such contact between undergraduates and graduate students would be desirable, but in the long run it was incompatible with a goal that must have been paramount for him--full participation by the College. The requirement for all undergraduates to live in the Houses only came as a matter of financial exigency during the Second World War. There is no doubt, however, that the Houses were felt to be a success from the very beginning.

Here we face a strange irony that calls for explanation: as the Houses have become more effective and more active, criticism of them had increased. If one looks at how little went on in them in those first years compared with now, it is strange to think that the 1930's are sometimes called the golden age of the Houses. There are, it seems to me, three main reasons for this apparent paradox, and a look at them can tell us some important things about the demands of undergraduate life today and the direction in which it may be useful to move in changing or strengthening the Houses and out system of education.

THE FIRST reason is, alas, irreversible: it is simply that in the early days living arrangements for undergraduates were comparatively luxurious, since upkeep and wages were correspondingly low. It was possible to maintain such things as uncrowded suites and daily maid service and waitresses and choice of menus for a very low price. The Houses were built for that style of living, and the crowding in the original Houses which began in the late 1940s' in order to keep down the cost per student will always be a nagging psychological drawback which can be solved only by architectural changes in the rooms (to which properly serious attention has never been given).

The second reason for dissatisfaction is in some ways a cheering one. It is simply that student expectations have risen. The rather formal and limited social contact between students and faculty, the clear definition of roles and hierarchies, and the boundaries between academic and social situations which were perfectly natural forty years ago have given way to a very different conception of human relations in an educational setting and an academic institution. Belief in such terms as "dialogue," "togetherness," and "unstructured learning," along with skeptical attitudes about distinctions of rank and age, have helped to make a world which is alarming and confusing to some, exciting and challenging to others, but certainly differing in its expectations. To the students who moved into the Houses in 1930 and 1931 the new community they found may have seemed warm and satisfying, looking and feeling rather like a more mature version of the good boarding schools to which most of them had gone. To our present students that atmosphere would seem impossibly stilted and confined, not at all what they expect in a community, whether academic or social.

This change of attitude is not a sudden one; it began after the Second World War and has evolved during two decades. The Houses should have provided a perfect instrument of response to it, and if they have not always done so, it is because it had been hard for those who run them, and who remember an earlier golden era, to realize that the very beauty of the system is its adaptability to new concepts of education and community, not its reflection of the ideals of a particular period. A great change was the decentralization into the Houses of the academic and counselling functions of the Dean's office in the early 1950's; another important change was the abandonment in the late 1960's of various social rules and restrictions which had come to make the Houses seem to many undergraduates anomalies in a university which had especially attracted them with its offer of independence and individualism and its claim to treat its members as mature and responsible human beings. The most recent improvement has been the recognition of widespread, almost universal, undergraduate conviction that separate residence units for men and women of college age are less natural and desirable than mixed units. The constant complaint about minor rules and the nagging opposition to required residence in the Houses which was so prevalent five years ago has all but disappeared. Many Houses find it hard to persuade a handful of Seniors to move out to reduce overcrowding. During the recent years of embittered protest and of denunciation of every part of the educational system, criticism of the Houses and those responsible for them has been limited among undergraduates to only one ground: not that they were doing the wrong thing, but that they were not working at it hard enough. This (together with Freshman Seminars) has been one area in which students and faculty (and administrators, if the staff of a House should be called that) have generally agreed that they are working within a viable mechanism toward mutually satisfactory goals. It should also be said, as one final point, that transfer students from other colleges, and tutors in the Houses who have been undergraduates at other universities, are often among those most enthusiastic about the House system at Harvard: they realize from personal experience, as Harvard students cannot, that it provides the possibility of close contact between people of different ages and interests and experience such as is offered by only a handful of other educational institutions in the world.

THE THIRD reason for dissatisfaction is the most fundamental one. It is that there is not enough connection between the Houses and formal undergraduate education. Although the Houses provide for musical activities, for drama, for discussions and forums, both formal and informal, both with our own faculty and with visitors, for athletic activities and social events, for innumerable conversations, both intellectual and frivolous, and for student government and its concerns, they do very little which directly involves the academic responsibilities of either faculty or students. It has been hard to persuade the departments to take seriously even the slight responsibility which was prescribed (in the Bender Report of 1950) of assigning Sophomores in Economics, English, Government, History and Social Relations to tutors associated with the Houses in which they live. President Lowell would have been quick to level this criticism himself, since the Houses in their present situation suffer from the shipwreck of half his scheme for their success. His idea of them was closely connected with his plan that the core of teaching at Harvard should be a tutorial system and that it should be centered in them. As he foresaw it, a student in a House would deal only or mainly with faculty members associated with his House, perhaps resident in it, and thus academic and social relationships would be closely parallel. This system, modelled on the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, would nog have worked for natural scientists in any case (as the English have discovered); financial stringencies of the depression years brought a cut in tutorial instead of the planned expansion; and a new administration beginning in 1933 had other priorities and little interest in the intensification of undergraduate education. Except for the dedicated concern of individual students and faculty members, the adoption of a partially successful plan for Sophomore tutorial assignments, and recently a measure of decentralization in curricular planning, the Houses have seen only piecemeal and short-lived attempts to involve them in the official instructional functions of the university. Their are some who feel quite honestly that there should be no such connection, and that the Houses fulfill their purpose by providing facilities for a full extra-curricular life. Some department centered faculty members fear some loss of standards, or at least loss of department authority regarding standards and appointments, if the Houses should take on a more academic role. Others worry about the possible exclusiveness of House-based courses. But most students and many faculty members regret the dichotomy that remains between the two aspects of college life and feel that ways lie open to remedy this defect and also to make better use of the great investment that has gone into the Houses already.

SUPPOSE STEPS might be taken to improve things, what could be done? First of all, three fundamental principles should be recognized: first, that the Houses work well only when they are limited in size as viable communities, and they cannot stand influxes of numbers or shifting populations; secondly, that the individual dining halls are the heart of whatever sense of community is felt or achieved; and thirdly, that facilities must be commensurate with the real needs of the Houses and the functions that they are expected to assume. Despite occasional promises during the last twenty years to undertake some full-scale renovation of the older Houses, nothing of the sort has ever been done. While millions of dollars have been poured into new building, the old buildings have been curiously neglected. And now two of the Houses in the Radcliffe area need similar renovation. If we should like to encourage teaching in the House area, for example, most of us have no adequate seminar or class rooms to use, even though in some of the Houses there is space available in which to create them. Thought about educational policy and thought about facilities should once again go hand in hand, as at the inauguration of the House system. It may then at least (or once again) provide for the whole range of student and faculty interests for which it was originally conceived.

Of course a number of undergraduates will always find the Houses unrewarding or uninteresting, since their thoughts and commitments will be elsewhere or their mode of life unsuited to them; no institution can mean the same thing to everyone. But it should certainly be said that even in their present form the Houses have year in and year out provided a center of interest and life and support for students far beyond any other single activity or program of the university.

I can speak to that point from experience with undergraduates and graduate students and parents during more that twenty years as a teacher at Harvard. And if I may add another personal note, I can say that for some of the teaching fellows, and faculty members who have become involved with them, they have been for us too one of the special rewards of our work at this university