In From the Cold

AMID ALL THE controversy about housing lotteries and Quad renovations, there is a group of about 60 undergraduates who couldn't care less.

They are of that intrepid breed called transfer students, those adventurers who after a year or two of college elsewhere tear up their roots to become part of "the Harvard experience." To most transfer, however, "the Harvard experience" is one of social isolation and bureaucratic insensitivity.

Admitted with non-resident status over the summer, transfers are not guaranteed housing under the current system, but are put on a waiting list until "space becomes available." Not realizing how, crowded the situation is, most transfers justifiably assume that they will eventually move on campus and enjoy late-night place parties with the rest of Harvard's undergraduates. They get this impression from their interviews and in communication with the University over the summer.

But as a new semester begins the situation hasn't improved. Only four out of this year's 60 made it into the housing system by the beginning of this term. Already the housing system has more students than it was designed for. And this year's freshman class has 30 bodies more than the administration projected, making next year's situation even worse. The University will have a hard enough time housing next year's freshman class, much less the 60 extra transfers. The new priority assigned transfers two years ago--second in the list, just behind students returning after a one-year absence with all their paperwork in order--thus means very litle.

So the transfers are brushed to one side. Their best hope is for the implementation of the Access, subcommittee's recommendation: affiliation with house in their junior year and housing the year after.

But that is a pitiful best hope, and the University knows it. As a 1983 Faculty Council report noted, "The College needs to provide [transfers] with as quick and effective an integration as possible, which means House living for most students."

Probably at no other university is it such anathema to live off-campus. A crucial part of a Harvard students' academic and social life centers around the Houses. No matter how such time a student spends in the libraries or in extra-curricular activities, there is no substitute for the good times and bad times transfers are new to Harvard, in effect virtual freshmen, the isolation is even worse. Instead of becoming part of "the Harvard experience," they are left on the outside looking in, feeling like second-class students. "I don't feel like a Harvard student. I feel like a transfer student at Harvard," one cynical transfer has said. Even if the University manages to get a transfer on campus in his senior year, by then it is too late.

There seems to be no solution that will alleviate the disappointment of those transfer students who are already here. But the problem, which is a few years old, does not have to continue indefinitely. The University knows that a Harvard student who has no choice but to live off-campus is not getting a full Harvard education, but year after year it admits so many students that this has to happen. A first, extremely useful step--for the alleviation of more than the transfer problem--is to limit the number of freshmen it lets in each year so that everyone who wants to be housed can be housed. Considering the University's rhetoric about the above-average performance of transfers, one would think this to be a reasonable solution. It can also make clear to prospective transfer students the improbability of their living on-campus and the consequences, both academic and social, that living off-campus entails. It can even create more space to house everyone accepted, possibly in Harvard-owned housing like Peabody Terrace.

Transfer students deserve a little extra effort on the part of Harvard officialdom. They make the extra effort to come to Cambridge, they arrive with an inherent adjustment handicap, and all information seems to indicate that they do extremely well regardless. Giving them the chance to "do well" socially, as well as academically, is simply the logical fulfillment of accepting transfer students in the first place.