Living It Up, Yale Style

As nagging mothers will do, my mom came up with a catchphrase my senior year in high school to tempt me to apply to and attend the school of her choice. Her slogan was surprisingly short and catchy: “They have more fun at Yale.”

While I knew enough to avoid my mom’s “advice,” I can’t deny that here at Harvard, we’ve had an ongoing discussion about our sluggish social life.

At a Undergraduate Council meeting early this month, University President Lawrence H. Summers fielded a question on this issue. In his answer, he suggested a potential move towards the housing system used at Yale.

This system would align first-year dorms to specific Houses and therefore grant first-years a House affiliation on day one. While no such change is presently being considered by the Housing Office, while students may be reluctant to change—the Crimson Staff, for example, came out against it—and while I hate conceding anything to my mom, the Yale plan is a markedly better option for students at Harvard.

Assigning a House affiliation to first-years would drastically improve House community, House pride and general social life on campus. First-year enthusiasm could help bolster lagging House communities and provide more bodies and funding for House parties, formals and other House events. In fact, the addition of more House-affiliated students might increase demand enough to warrant more activities.

The Yale system would provide a network for first-years to meet upperclassmen—granting them academic and social advisers in the way that many other schools have RAs. As it stands, social interaction between first-years and upperclassmen is limited to extracurricular activities and sports teams. But a junior with whose House you are affiliated can tell you which classes to avoid and can invite you to their party this coming Saturday.

Without substantial contact with upperclassmen, first-years resort to marching around in packs on weekends scouring the campus for parties. Instead of blindly following one another around the river—“I heard there’s a party in Leverett”—students affiliated with Houses that interacted with upperclassmen would know where to find the parties and, potentially, who was throwing them.

Switching to the Yale system would eliminate the arduous blocking experience. While choosing blocking groups may be a breeze for some students, for many others it is one of the most emotionally strenuous and painful experiences at college. Friendships are strained and others are broken in the process of choosing “seven best friends.” Some students even begin to stress about it very early in their first year, wondering if they’ll find a group with whom to block.

The major criticism of the Yale system is that it decreases student choice. Granted, some first-years will find a group of friends they want to live with outside the approximately 130 that would be in their House; others will not get along with members of their first-year entryway and will want to switch away from them. Therefore, a change to the Yale system would need to be accompanied by a free, easy, liberal transfer system between Houses. First-years who wished to room with students from another dorm could simply apply to switch Houses with the understanding that all individual requests would be accommodated.

Would we then be worried about students flooding into certain highly demanded Houses? Probably not. The sooner students are integrated into their House communities, the more quickly they forget their preference for other Houses. Students given a House on day one would become a part of their House communities as first-years, and by sophomore year would be more reluctant to change. At Yale, where it is relatively easy to transfer residential colleges, only 35 on average out of a class of 1,400 choose to do so, according to the Yale Daily News. Yale posts low transfer numbers even though some of its residential colleges are much nicer than others.

Similarly, critics are concerned that attaching students to Houses early on would work to undermine first-year cohesiveness. But social life is not a zero-sum game. Giving students a feeling of belonging in a House community will not detract from the bonding that happens between members of a new class. The reason that first-years feel strong bonds is that they they live in and around the Yard—in the winter months they seem to be penned in—and they have the opportunity to eat in Annenberg. These experiences work to foster connections between students and would not be diminished by granting House affiliations. Upperclassmen who lose touch with their first-year acquaintances generally do not blame their House communities for pulling them away from their friends—“Damn Dunster House!” Instead, they blame the true culprits—distance and time constraints.

The walk to Annenberg the day that Houses are assigned is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen at Harvard—upperclassmen screaming, cheering and distributing t-shirts to their newest House-mates. In a switch to the Yale system, the elements that make this day so moving—powerful student enthusiasm, strong community building and ferocious House pride—would be present over the entire year.

Judd B. Kessler ’04 is an economics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.