If at First You Don't Succeed...

This is the second installment in a series of features on issues that face Harvard this spring.

One day last March, just before spring vacation, 133 freshmen tore open their House assignment notices and found a computer readout telling them that they had been assigned to a Quad House that they had included in their botton three choices. Many of the 133, angry and disappointed, complained for the next two months to just about anyone who would listen. Individually and collectively they visited Eleanor C. Marshall, assistant to the dean for housing, to win a new house assignment or, failing that, at least a spot on the waiting list of those hoping to transfer to River House.

The freshmen also took their complaints to the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life. Members of CHUL's subcommittee on housing listened patiently, but promised only to look into the problem.

Ten months and countless meetings later, CHUL is still looking. In its January 21 meeting, the last one of the fall semester, the committee approved three recommendations on the housing system. But the panel also sent two other recommendations back to its executive subcommittee for further study and left the sticky task of implementation totally unsettled.

To make matters more uncertain, CHUL will rendezvous again today with the experienced 1975 student members replaced by an almost totally green board elected last fall which can--and apparently will--vote to reverse the recommendations that their predecessors approved after extended debate. Finally, when CHUL does settle on its final housing recommendations, they will go to Dean Rosovsky, who could veto the CHUL's recommendation and choose his own plan.

Before it slipped into the annals of Harvard committees, the 1975 CHUL had agreed to recommend that the male-to-female ratio be fixed at 1.5-to-1 in four resident Houses and as close as possible to 3-to-1 in all the remaining eight. Currier, North and South Houses are now theoretically on a 1.18-to-1 male-female ratio. The committee's other final proposal asked that each freshman be "fruitfully affiliated" with a House throughout the freshman year and endorsed continued upgrading of facilities and services in the Quad area.

The first of two recommendations referred back to the subcommittee suggested that each House be assigned part of the freshman class and a proportional amount of space in the Yard. This play would allow each House to choose whether to settle its assigned freshmen in the Yard or in the House itself with upperclassmen then filling some or all of the Yard openings. CHUL also tagged for reconsideration a recommendation that the House assignment system continue to allow student choice.

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As everyone knows, the central problem with the current housing system is the unpopularity of the Quad Houses. Those 133 griping freshman last spring comprised about 40 per cent of 310 students in the Class of 1978 assigned to the Quad Houses. The administration now says that about 100 of the 133 have moved out, with the remainder apparently deciding that the Quad was not so bad after all.

In addition, about 70 per cent of last year's freshmen included Currier House--the most popular of the three Quad Houses--in their last three choices, and about 90 per cent listed the other two Houses among their three lowest choices. This information comes from this fall's report of the summer housing study group of University Hall officials, and breaks an administration tradition of refusing to release figures on the relative popularity of Houses. This fall, it seems, they broke their own policy to demonstrate how many --or how few--students want to live at the Quad.

The Quad's popularity problem is a switch from the appeal it had in the first years of co-educational housing. For several years after 1971 there were always Harvard students ready to walk the extra distance to the Quad for the attractive sex ratio, four-class housing and other enticements.

But now all of River Houses have gone co-ed and in some the sex ratio has dropped down to about 2.5-to-1. This change has neutralized what had been the Quad's biggest selling point. Little has been done to date to make the Quad more attractive, such as adopting all-day shuttle bus services, although the administration is planning some renovations of North and South Houses.

Isolating this central problem is far easier than any tea-leaf reading about what will happen this spring. Three forces will apparently shape the final form of the CHUL recommendations: the unpredictable incoming student members of the panel, growing administration objections to CHUL's January recommendations, and problems of implementation that the old panel never had time to face.

Of the student members on the 1976 committee, only Katherine E. Fulton '78 of Winthrop House will come to today's University Hall meeting with a year's experience. While the new members appear satisfied with the proposal for four 1.5-to-1 houses, some may challenge the old committee's recommendation that the four be divided equally between River and Quad Houses.

Implementation of such a proposal would dissolve the Quad's roughly even male-female ratio, leaving one of the three Houses with a less attractive proportion of men and women.

Although the old CHUL sent the question of retaining student choice back to its executive subcommittee, there appears to be little doubt that the new board will favor retention. Indeed some speculated that the representatives-elect were responsible for the old board's shift on the question of student choice. In straw votes on January 14 CHUL indicated that it favored recommending that a system of random student assignments at the end of freshman year be used for one to three years. But a week later, in its final meeting, the 1975 CHUL turned a quick about-face, recommending to Rosovsky that any future assignment system allow student choice. Yet betraying some lingering uncertainty CHUL decided to send the proposal back to subcommittee for further study.

Hopes that the new CHUL will quickly dispatch its housing recommendations have faded principally because the administration, has objected to the so-called "Grabar proposal." This plan, named after the outgoing North House Co-master Oleg Grabar '50, would ask Rosovsky to give each House spaces in the Yard proportional to the number of freshmen the House was assigned.

After a series of straw votes in December, the old CHUL appeared ready to recommend that all freshmen be housed in the Yard, which would eliminate four-year Houses. But representatives from the Quad continued to argue for a system that would maintain freshmen in Currier, North and South Houses. The Quad Committee had drawn up proposals backing up these CHUL members and nominally permitting other Houses to include first-yea students also.

At the January 21 CHUL meeting Grabar offered his proposal, which was much like the Quad Committee's, but did not call for permanent freshman assignment to Houses in the fall. Grabar's proposal passed after about an hour's debate, without the Quad Committee proposal being introduced. The Grabar proposal never achieved the status of a final recommendation to Dean Rosovsky, however, because the committee voted to send it back to the executive subcommittee for further discussion.

The evidence indicates that the proposal will not make it through the new CHUL without substantial change, if at all. Dean Whitlock told Grabar last week that this plan could not be implemented next year because it requires too many new administrative arrangements. Grabar admits there are weaknesses with his proposal. He said yesterday that he made his proposal assuming, incorrectly, that CHUL wanted eventually to move to having only four-class Houses. The reconsideration of the Grabar proposal is the first item on today's agenda. The administration will make its objections to the plan's feasibility and rejection of the proposal is expected.

Bruce Collier, assistant dean of Harvard College and the University's resident housing and computer genius, said he believes that the Grabar plan would have a destructive effect on the Quad Houses. For every freshman a Quad House puts in the Quad, he says, an upperclassman would be forced into the Yard. If the Quad Houses housed students who liked the Quad in the Yard or if they put students disenchanted with the Quad in the Yard, those students are likely to remain disenchanted with and isolated from their Houses. Either way, Collier says, the Quad Houses would lose.

Why did CHUL look favorably on the Grabar proposal if it had this inherent flaw? One major reason was that some Quad representatives, including Grabar, saw the plan as their only hope for keeping freshmen in the Quad Houses. Alan E. Heimert '49, Eliot House master, while no advocate of Quad causes, is a defender of master's interests and saw the Grabar resolution favorably as "the first time in seven years that the CHUL has voted in favor of any form of House autonomy." And so the Grabar proposal passed with the rare alliance of Heimert and the Quad.

While the "fruitful affiliation" resolution recommended by CHUL will not come up before the meeting today, administrators are also uneasy with its provision that "a system of fruitful affiliation of freshmen with the Houses be established." As the words "fruitful affiliation" might suggest, the committee never stated specifically what kind of connection it wanted between first-year students and Houses. The tie might mean that freshmen would eat their weekend meals at a single House throughout the entire freshman year. This plan would replace the present system under which freshmen rotate their meals between as many as eight Houses until they are assigned permanently to a House in the Spring.

The final trap facing the new committee is the touchy question of implementation. The biggest brouhaha could center around which Houses should be blessed with a 1.5-to-1 male-female balance, especially a nine River Houses try to battle for the one or two slots with the more attractive ratio. This inescapable problem arose repeatedly during the old CHUL's discussions, but a pre-set agenda prevented serious debate over which Houses would be 1.5-to-1.

This issue and others such as the precise meaning of "fruitful affiliation" could significantly shift student positions on the overall housing system. Indeed several CHUL members felt restricted by the piecemeal debate of housing conducted by the old panel.

The mystery man in the debate over the housing system is Dean Rosovsky. In consultation with Bok and Horner, he will make the final decision on what to do with the housing system and he isn't saying what he believes. Rosovsky said yesterday he will not comment on any of the proposals before CHUL until he has studied the panel's final recommendations. All of the CHUL's straw votes, debates, tentative recommendations, and final proposals won't matter at all if Rosovsky doesn't want them to.

What has the CHUL accomplished in its discussions since last spring? It has probably eliminated any chance for adoption of the 1-1-2 proposal that would put all freshmen at the Quad, all sophomores in the Yard, and the two upper classes in the River Houses. The plan to create a system of 16 four-year Houses was also rejected as too expensive, although it was voted the "most desirable" of all the options.

What is left, the, is a recommendation to create 1.5-to-1 sex ratios in four Houses and a vague desire of CHUL to "fruitfully affiliate" freshmen with Houses. Beyond that not much is certain. The new panel will reconsider Grabar's proposal today after hearing objections from administrators. If the Grabar plan is voted down, two prominent alternatives will remain: a system of all three-year Houses, or a continuation of the present system with four-year Houses at the Quad. If the old CHUL's January straw vote strongly favoring a unified housing system is a reliable indication, the three-year Houses have the inside track.

Perhaps the only statement on which CHUL will definitely agree today is the old saw that the camel was a horse designed by a committee.