Housing Ratios

THE HOUSING situation at Harvard is still a mess. Pressure from Houses with high men-to-women ratios has now generated a proposal to distribute women evenly among the Harvard College Houses. If the proposal is passed by the Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life (CHUL), men to women ratios will approach 6:1 in all the Harvard Houses.

Above all, it is clear that housing conditions will not be satisfactory until there is a 1:1 ratio of men to women throughout Harvard and Radcliffe. The Harvard-Radcliffe "non-merger" merger brought co-residential living; but far from assuaging the problems of uneven numbers of men and women, it highlighted the intolerable situation perpetuated by Harvard's sexist admissions policy.

Last year, the first full year of co-residential living, 6:1 ratios in five Houses proved inadequate to create comfortable coed communities. Women held mass meetings last spring to argue for acceptable ratios in the Harvard Houses. Their requests were met: in applying to the Harvard Houses, women were allowed to choose among them on the basis of maximum ratios of men to women. To spread women thinly among all Harvard Houses would break the tacit promise of acceptable ratios made to them last spring.

The people living in the high-ratio Houses certainly deserve a better housing situation as much as those who live in low-ratio Houses. Yet until an equal admissions policy is achieved, a somewhat higher priority to supportive women's living conditions is justified: women in small minorities in the nine Houses would be isolated from other women as well as from unstrained contact with men.

CHUL has been instrumental in determining housing arrangements for undergraduate men and women. Typically, of 33 votes on CHUL, only 4 1/2 are those of women. (Ursula Levine--Co-Master of Currier House--shares one vote with her husband.)

The proposal now before CHUL should be defeated. The ratio of men to women in the Harvard Houses should be kept at least at what they are at present and certainly not widened. Women should be placed in overwhelmingly male Houses only on a volunteer basis, as was done this year. If those women who chose Eliot, Kirkland, Leverett or Mather Houses find the situation dismaying, they should be allowed to move back to Radcliffe, while upperclass women at Radcliffe should have the choice to move to Harvard. Furthermore women who are transfers should be placed in Houses with good ratios. This year they were assigned to Mather House, drastically limiting their opportunities to make female friends.

WE BELIEVE that women should not be treated as commodities and favor the preservation of viable co-residential communities within Harvard College. We urge all students to sign the petitions which are being circulated in the dining halls and to go to the strategy meeting at 8 p.m. tonight in the Dunster dining hall to support these policies before representatives of the Administration and CHUL.