Blocking Group Size Slashed in Half to Eight

Hoping to improve student involvement in House life, the College will halve the maximum size of blocking groups to eight from the current cap of 16, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 confirmed Wednesday.

Lewis' decision, scheduled to take effect with the Class of 2003, will significantly limit the number of first-year students who may "block" together and enter the College's housing lottery as a single group.

The move is the biggest change to House policy since the 1995 decision known as randomization, which eliminated all student preference in upper-class housing selection.

Since then, the College has seen the number of large blocking groups balloon, leading to concerns among House Masters that students were using large blocking groups as a way to insulate themselves from involvement in House communities.

Also, many Houses have struggled to even gender ratios among their populations, which have become unbalanced due in part to mostly-male or mostly-female blocking groups.

As a result, Lewis announced his intention to review blocking group sizes over the summer at a meeting of the Committee on House Life (COHL) last semester. Although Lewis would not offer an indication of his intentions then, many Masters said they anticipated a reduction in group size.

And in an e-mail message yesterday, Lewis said he and the Masters noticed that most large blocking groups are not entirely comprised of close friends--in particular, "the 'hinged' blocked phenomenon" in which one large blocking group is comprised of two sub-groups that are linked by a few common friends.

And despite his professed sensitivity to retaining friendship groups created during students' first years, Lewis said the smaller groups offer adequate opportunity to block with close friends.

"Eight is actually not a small number for a friendship group," Lewis wrote in the e-mail message. "It's large enough to accommodate most close friendship groups, including groups involving both men and women, but small enough to ensure that students from one block will get to know other students in the House and to enable the gender ratios to be well balanced everywhere in the future."

Although the decision was not taken to a vote, Lewis and other Masters said the decision appeared to have the unqualified support of the entire council of Masters.

Quincy House Master Michael Shinagel, who also chairs the council of masters and is a member of the COHL, said this decision addresses what most concur is a glaring shortcoming of randomization.

"Our experience is that randomization has worked well, with the sole exception that we get these artificially engorged blocking groups," Shinagel said. "It's harder to integrate people into the House as a whole."

In addition, the size change will allow the Houses to pinpoint the ideal gender ratio.

"With smaller blocks, it will be possible to get the gender ratios in each House much closer to the ratio for the College as a whole," Lewis wrote.

In 1996, when the College did not control for gender in the randomization process, the rising sophomore class assigned to Pforzheimer House was 70 percent male, leading to an overall House population that was 59 percent male.

Even among those Masters who did not originally support randomization, the consensus is that the size reduction is an appropriate move.

For Eliot House Master Stephen A. Mitchell, a long-time foe of randomization, the change will make the Houses more diverse, letting randomization live up to its name.

But for many students, the change stirs up bitterness from the decision to randomize the House system.

Undergraduate Council President Noah Z. Seton '00, a student representative to the COHL, said yesterday that he was disappointed by the decision. Although he said one or two of the other student representatives to COHL might have supported the decrease in blocking size, Seton said the council has traditionally been firmly against any lowering of the number of students per blocking group.

"With randomization, people should be able to block with whoever they want," Seton said. "I'm not sure that this will be the cure-all they hope it is."

Seton says he hopes the change in the size of the blocking groups will add momentum to the council's campaigns to get universal keycard access for all the Houses and to equalize House resources.