RAGE AGAINST THE RATIO

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Thursday's article on the CHUL housing debate, while narrowly accurate, fails to enlighten the Harvard community about the real depth of anger among Quad residents over the threatened destruction of their Houses. In the first two days of reading period, a hastily-organized petition drive gained the signatures of 732 Quad residents--about 90% of those present--in favor of 1:1 and four-class housing. A hundred showed up to demonstrate in the cold and to attend a rather boring CHUL meeting. Why is it that we care so deeply?

Several CHUL members wanted to "upgrade" the Quad Houses by using a no-choice system to place especially enthusiastic students at the Quad--as if our trouble were lack of enthusiasm. Others thought that the best way to solve our popularity problem is to remove all traces of uniqueness from the Quad houses, to make them as indistinguishable from other Houses as possible. If the same program of social engineering were proposed for Kirkland House, no doubt its residents would be equally upset. If Quad residents sometimes seem overly defensive, perhaps it is because we always end up having to defend. If your House lacked physical facilities, geographic proximity, and most of all, respectability within the Harvard/Radcliffe housing system--if the only things that made living in your House worthwhile were the 1:1 and four-class environment--wouldn't you resist any attempt to take these things away from you? If the goal is to correct misimpressions about the Quad and to improve its popularity, does it make sense to take away our closest link to Yard freshmen--that is, our own freshmen--and to take away our one university (95%) desired feature, the 1:1 ratio? Think about it.

Matina Horner stated the adamant view of the Radcliffe Trustees that there be "some place in the University where women are not in a minority." Does the CHUL plan of two 1:5:1 Quad Houses, one 3:1 Quad Houses, and two 1:5:1 enclaves among the 3:1 River Houses really suffice? Should the women of this University accept being outnumbered 2:1 or more essentially wherever they go?

The biggest losers in the CHUL straw vote are the freshmen, both the present ones and those of years to come. For the next one to three years, freshmen will be denied the right to express their House preferences. And all freshmen will henceforth live in dormitories, segregated from upperclasspeople--this in spite of CHUL's overwhelming vote of lip service to four-class House: they are the best arrangement "if financial considerations permit." But there is a plan which, at no expense, preserves and extends four-class Houses. Proposed independently by the Quad Committee and RUS, it affiliates all freshmen with Houses, and assigns Yard space to each House to use either for freshman or upperclass housing, as it desires. (This is only the barest sketch; details can be found in the QC and RUS reports.) But CHUL has, despite the energetic efforts of a few members (not only the Quad ones), so far ignored this plan, CHUL should reconsider. Alan Sokal '76   North House