House System

In the midst of a third year of a $50 million renovation project, the structure of Harvard's 13 residential Houses received a lot more attention than a mere scraping of paint and scrubbing of bricks. As workers continued refurbishing the Houses, administrators and students turned their sights on several long-standing sources of concern.

The most immediate was the question of House diversity, which has been perplexing administrators ever since surveys several years ago started showing wide disparities in academic and racial composition in the Houses. Another report was issued this year, confirming the worst fears of officials.

Authored by Associate Registrar Jay A. Halfond and Mather House Senior Tutor Steven A. Epstein, the study once again showed that students gravitate to Houses that conform to perceived stereotypes, causing, for instance, wide disparities in academic performance in the Houses.

The findings once again resuscitated calls for an abolition of the housing lottery based on choice, in favor of a random lottery. Administrators and members of the Undergraduate Council, however, appeared to be exploring more moderate solutions to eliminate these disparities.

The student-faculty Committee on Housing, for instance, issued a report recommending that only 70 percent of a House be filled by choice, with the remainder being filled randomly. While the committee and its student link, the Undergraduate Council, refrained from endorsing this proposal it may be brought up again in the fall.

"There are a number of people concerned with the consequences of the lottery," says Dean of the College John B. Fox Jr. '59. But he adds that student impetus for change in the system may be held back because it is a seasonal issue and because students have so many views on the subject.

"It's appropriate to consider other ways, but I'd be sorry to give up choice altogether" says Assistant Dean for Housing Thomas A. Dingman '67.

The housing of transfer students also received a new priority from administrators this year as they stepped up a campaign to avoid what officials call "involuntary non-residence." For the first time this year students transferring from other colleges--who at one point had been denied housing altogether--were moved to an all-time high on the priority list. This resulted in an influx of 60 new students into the housing system, according to Director of Housing Teresa Cavalier.

This influx could result in crowding in the Houses, when students returning from leave--whose places the transfer students filled--return to the system, according to Dingman. Dingman predicts that the crunch may force the Houses to accomodate as many as 30 extra people. "We're counting on the Houses to be as inventive as they can about this. For example, seniors may not get the type of accomodations they traditionally have been promised," he says.

To solve this problem, Dingman says he and other college officials will be using a report which analyzes the space in each room to redistribute crowding in Houses that have a little more breathing space.

In addition to the composition of Houses, the quality of daily life in the Houses also received attention from both students and administrators. While most of the work is still preliminary, a report was initialed by the Committee on Housing to devise ways of increasing student-faculty contact.