Face the Facts

LIKE AN addiction to smoking, the striking realities of the current House system are something people all around Harvard apparently can't deny quickly enough. Consider the Tuesday edition of this newspaper:

*in a page I story. Undergraduate Council officials are reported to be hoping that they can keep secret the most telling message from the recent House referendum: the House-by-House breakdown of results. Council members and Thomas A. Dingman '67, assistant dean of the College for the House system, are quoted as saying they are afraid of letting freshmen know what each House thinks of the current preference-based selection system. "Anything that would alter students' choices in advance of a lottery would only cause more anxiety," Dingman says.

*in another page I story, Dingman is quoted as refusing to supply the breakdown of transfers accepted and rejected by House, "because he said he does not want these statistics to reflect poorly on any Houses in particular."

*in a third page I story, we meet a business-minded junior who is publishing an "Insider's Guide to the Houses" because he says he wants "to go beyond the dry data the University puts out about the Houses." Other students are quoted as "recalling the insufficient information about the Houses [they] received" as freshmen.

You should be noticing something suspicious here, like the roommate who claims he can quit any time, yet is always chain-smoking.

LET'S FACE IT. Eliot House has a lot of final club members and people who went to prep schools. Currier House has a lot of Black students. Kirkland House is great for intramural football and less-than-hot for average GPA; Lowell House is great for Phi Beta Kappa membership and less-than-hot for parties. Adams House's Westmorcty Court and Senior House are splendid and supremely spacious places to live; Mather's low-rise--at least this year--is not. Living at the Quad and having to take a bus to classes is a pain in the ass.

And it's ridiculous of Dingman and council officials to try to deny those basic facts and stuff them under the rug.

Harvard's Houses, in both their overall character and quality of life, have never been the same, are not the same now, and been never be the same as long as North House is still a collection of former women's dorms, Mather House is a jam-packed 17-story basement, and Lowell House can offer its seniors single rooms.

Moreover, the Houses' ingrained institutional characters--jocky, wonky, artsy, prephead--are not going to go away as long as the preference-based system lets students live with the folks they choose. Or, as is more often the case these days, select their House as a way to avoid stereotypes they fear and loathe.

Harvard's highly touted diversity, the reason most of you probably decided to apply here, has got to be more than something you just experience freshman year in Weld with the hockey player, Pudding Show star and dopehead living in the suite across the hall, before they split for Kirkland. Adams and Quincy Houses respectively.

That lack of diversity--along with perennial and well-founded gripes about crowded and dingy conditions--is one of the major problems that needs to be addressed. But in Dingman's and other administrators' haste to cover up the problem, they are just aggravating it.

Before they move in, freshmen usually learn such vital things about a House as how many people it has and where the dining hall is. Typically, they can also tell you the code word for the Houses with the most blatant reputations.

But Dingman and others would shut off the most valuable piece of information: what the House's residents really think of living there. That you can only find out completely once you've moved in. And the best measures of what people really think are the council's referendum--which asked residents their candid of their House's quality of life--and the figures for which Houses people are trying escape from.

SOME OF THE Houses are a let better to live in than others. Smoking is addictive. Both are facts, and there's no reason to be ashamed of either. But if the College is serious about trying to make the Houses more equal, both in their comfort and representation of the Rainbow Coalition that is Harvard, it should own up to the facts.

At the Quad, the University is making lurching progress. Three years from now, after all the dust has settled. Cabot House residents will enjoy much bigger and prettier rooms. Once a donor is found to rebuild North House, it may be brought up to parity with its River counterparts. Those are great first steps. Still, the less concrete issues of how the preferential lottery works against Harvard's diversity, and how undergraduates feel about House life today, have yet to be addressed.

Releasing statistics will certainly discourage people from applying to certain Houses. And of course, it will not change the number of people stuck where they don't want to be. But accepting the reality those statistics show--that quality of life in the Houses is wildly uneven--is the first step toward actually starting to do something about it.