When Choice Isn't Anything

"WHERE do you think you'll end up living next year?"

This used to be a relatively simple question to answer. Life is always simple until administrators waving demographic spreads and statistics invade our lives and try to make things a little more fair. This year, their major offensive has become the number one issue of the Class of '93, and the Great Housing Debate will never be the same again.

I am willing to admit right now that I don't know where I want to live next year, and I don't really care either. An upperclass house will be a blessing as long as I don't have to share a shower with 14 other women. I will be happy if I can merely get away from the mass mass-produced food at the Union.

The Undergraduate Council and the house masters have recently given up on the housing issue. I expect that Dean Jewett will also find the issue too complex to deal with and will turn it over to President Bok. The only higher authority than Bok at Harvard is God, but God has a tendency towards order. God will probably leave the task to entropy, the only natural process of randomization in the world.

But until whoever makes the final decisions on housing and announces them publicly--which I assume will come after some person of authority actually decides how the new system will work, after the administration plays with the results, after we see how the choice works and after the administration decides to change its mind--my fellow classmates and I are doomed to discuss our options. My guess is that the preliminary decisions should be out before finals, and the revised ones sometime over the summer.

So, what do we have to talk about until the fateful day when our housing for the next three years is sealed? Just about everything. Our major problem at the moment is that we don't know how to beat the new housing system. We don't even know what that system is.

OUR only hope in the meantime is to figure out how to manipulate the administration no matter what route it chooses. We are lucky that the QRR is harder this year, because now we (myself not included) are experts in playing with statistics.

My roommates and I, tired of looking at the campus map to see which house is further away from the Yard--Mather or North--tried to figure out the proposed lottery systems scientifically.

"There are 1600 first-year students and there are 12 houses," I said, offering what little help I could to my statistics-minded roommates.

"So that means if we get a high lottery number, say in the upper third, we pick three `Prime' houses, or maybe three really bad houses if we have to pick our three non-choices. If we get a low lottery number, we should pick good houses if it's non-non-choice and three bad ones for regular part-partial-fractional-randomization. I guess the only way to be definite is to get a middle number and pick a low-advantage/non-offensive house."

A voice of reason piped in: "What if they don't tell us our number?"

"Uhhh..." the scientist replied.

MANY first-year students, some have argued, don't care where they live as long as they are with their friends. I haven't seen any evidence to support that. One conversation I heard in the Coop displayed exactly the opposite conclusion.

"If we block with 10 of our closest friends and we end up in the Quad, it won't be that bad. We'll all hang out together. It won't even matter that we didn't want to live there in the first place," I heard one person say emphatically to six people standing near the Hallmark rack.

One of them looked at her rudely and walked away.

Her best friend smiled and said, "That's OK, we won't leave you out there by yourself. We'll come visit."

I can see how conversations like these can get frustrating. The pressure caused one distraught young man in my English class to exclaim, "Why do you people insist on talking about housing all of the time? It's only December for God's sake. We can't do anything about it for another couple of months. We can't do anything about it then either. All of you should just calm down and think about something that we can actually have an effect on--like nuclear disarmament or Third World human rights violations. Read a book if you don't like activism. Play Nintendo. I don't care. Just leave me alone."

IN the three months that we have been discussing this issue, I have encountered only one person who approached the debate with the appropriate tone. An Indy comper walked up to a first-year student while he was sitting in the Union and the comper asked him what lottery policy he liked best.

"It would be a toss up between partly-rational-Harmonization and completely-partial-free-non-choice," the interviewee said.

"Why?" the comper asked.

"Because they sound good," he replied.

The only interesting aspects of the new housing systems are their names. I just hope everything sounds this good when my class finds out where they are living next year. We'll probably end up with "part-partial dissatisfaction" and "completely randomized ire."