The Death of the Houses

Thursday will be a turning point in the Harvard experience for the Class of 2003. They will see how the dice have fallen--whether they can gloat about a new home in Adams, say, or shuffle along, disgruntled, wondering how long until they understand the shuttle schedule.

The anguish and the ecstasy will come from the fact that the current housing system is fundamentally unfair. Harvard's housing resources are unequal: Some Houses have more room, some better views, and most importantly, some are close to classes and the extracurricular heart of campus, while others are...near the Observatory.

More importantly, the current House system is not creating community. Houses have become colonies of independent blocking groups, old House traditions have petered out, since no one particularly cares about the affiliation, and many House masters who have retired in the randomization years have murmured that they could not connect with the new House members--who knew if they wanted to be in that House or not?

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, the authority on housing decisions, seems to understand this second set of issues, and has put forward the eight-person blocking group to increase the interaction between blocking groups in the Houses. "Harvard goes to extraordinary lengths to find the most talented, ambitious and interesting future leaders of the world," Lewis said in a recent interview with The Crimson. "If you live with all of your friends from Andover or from the football team, you're losing something."

I disagree with Dean Lewis' premises. First, on diversity (though he would not use that term), I think the hard work of the Freshman Dean's Office's housing pays off. Students are bombarded by difference in their first year and, more than ethnic group or extracurricular, Harvard students tend to block with members of their original, diverse entryways. Second, I disagree with Dean Lewis on the point about encouraging interaction within the Houses. I think creating community is an essential job for the College and I would love there to be a sense of community within the Houses, but I think randomization killed it. Sure, House life once meant certain houses were ethnically imbalanced, full of athletes or had a more active gay and lesbian community. Randomization has tried to end any such clusterings within the House: In the name of diversity, the diverse House communities were destroyed.

Yet Lewis is right at least in surmising the problem. I don't think eight-person blocking groups are the answer because I dislike the blocking system altogether. At best I think this is an acceptable interim step--much like the way blocking groups once could choose four Houses as a short-lived compromise in the years immediately before randomization.

Lewis has thought too narrowly about upperclass-student housing under the mistaken assumption that the Houses as Houses are still valuable. Living in one place for three years, eating in the same dining hall and checking mail in the same place may help encourage community, but it has not done so. Harvard students look to classes and activities as loci for community and to the Houses as places where they sleep in a large building filled with total strangers. Once, communities were linked by at least a four-in-12 sort of preference; now, living together in a House is a coincidence less instructive than matching section times. What would be better? All plans have their pro's and con's, but at least three, in my mind, might provide a better solution:

1. The Yale plan. Assign students Houses before students arrive. It doesn't matter if you room them that way in the Yard or mix them up, but create a list from which they can work at meeting people and finding suitable roommates. The problems with this system are that it curtails student choice rather severely, and doesn't deal with the inherent dislike some have for the Quad.

2. The Rawlsian plan. So named by my suitemate who transferred from the Quad and feels that no one, under the "veil of ignorance," would choose to live there. Random or not, he argues, the system is at base unjust if it makes some people live unfairly disadvantaged for three years.

One such answer is the Sophomore Quad: all first-years in and around the Yard, all sophomores in and around the Quad. This would require some renovation/construction to fit everyone. This system would make housing over the lifetime of the Harvard student more equitable, at a rather great cost--it would cut down on interaction between sophomores, juniors and seniors. Another drawback is denying the rights of those who (however strangely) like to live in the Quad; but we do kick people out of the Yard after a year, so the were policy would fly with these folk too.

3. The Brown plan. Maybe the best thing to do is to throw in the towel when it comes to the Houses and adopt a plan like Brown's upperclass student housing: beyond the first year, all the College's housing is in one big lottery. Students would pick rooming groups and then compare all the factors, from size to distance from the Yard to view, and chose year-by-year what is best given their lottery pick. Houses will not have an equal distribution of sophomores, juniors and seniors, but the best housing will be more judiciously distributed, students will have more varied experiences and the system will encourage more College community, if not community within the individual Houses. The end of attachment to a certain House community isn't much of a loss; with randomization, overall College community seems the only viable option anyway.

There is no easy answer, but we must come to see the House system is dead and it is time to move on. Bigger changes than eight-person blocking groups are necessary in order to bring community back to the Houses with more than random luck.

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.