In the Zone

After weeks—more likely, months—of agonizing over every possible combination of social groups and rooming scenarios, freshmen now have just two days to solidify their blocking plans. With online registration closing Wednesday morning, the blocking season—considered by many to be one of the most stressful and divisive episodes in the Harvard experience—is finally coming to an end.

In what has become an inevitable annual tradition, the flaws of the blocking system have again been subject to intense scrutiny. And while much of the criticism is leveled by those members of the Class of 2008 currently embroiled in the process, even upperclassmen favored with the gift of hindsight (most would likely agree that, in retrospect, blocking choices are far less monumentous than they seem at the time) can admit that the current procedure is far from perfect. But thusfar, reasonable solutions seem few and far between.

The sizable benefit to choosing blockmates demands strong opposition to scrapping the process entirely—Yale-style housing has unfortunately been put on the table—but the most commonly touted reform proposal, changing the number of members allowed in each blocking group, is similarly unsatisfactory.

Some argue that blocking went wrong when the College lowered the cap on blockmates from 16 to eight back in 2000, creating problems for large groups of friends now forced to break into smaller clusters or cut members one at a time. It’s too easy to attribute the stress of blocking season to a certain shallowness—when it comes down to it, picking blockmates is a popularity contest of sorts. Being the odd one out carries a certain stigma, and nowhere can this unfortunate mindset be seen more clearly than in the attitude displayed towards the dreaded “floaters.”

But while manipulating the size of blocking groups might indeed solve the problems for the current groups of nine or 10, there will always be those groups with just one more person than allowed. The real problem with the current blocking system is far deeper than this discussion of numbers suggests.

The most severe anxiety caused by the current system comes weeks after the groups have been set in stone: the housing lottery. Shuttle service aside, keeping up close friendships over increased distance takes time and effort, two things that no undergrad ever seems to have enough of. The frenzy associated with blocking season stems primarily from the fact that it’s hard to imagine that everything will work out in the end—especially if best friends one through eight are Quadded and number nine ends up on the River.

The way to assuage this fear goes beyond increasing (or decreasing) the size of the groups allowed; it requires giving students a little reassurance that blocking apart does not mean the end of a friendship. The best way to do this would be to incorporate a zoning system into the housing lottery. For instance, three Houses could be designated into a zone—the Quad being Zone 1, Mather/Leverett/Dunster being Zone 2, etc.—and add a line to the online blocking application where pairs of blocking groups can request to be placed in a zone together.

This system would have a number of benefits, primarily because it would keep friends in closer proximity. Splitting a group of friends into multiple blocking groups would become far less problematic—there would even be far more incentive to break nine friends into groups of four and five instead of eight and one. But a more subtle effect is also worthy of particular mention: freshmen would no longer feel they have to choose between the people they want to live with and the people they want to hang out with on weekends—a relevant distinction when considering future housing arrangements.

Some may worry that zoning will undermine the diveristy the eight-person blocking groups are intended to foster—i.e. the whole football team will end up living in the same zone. But if members of a campus group want to spend all their time together, they will find a way to make it happen—often in ways detrimental to House community. If given a chance to live near each other, however, these same groups would be more likely to spend time in convenient, on-campus locations and would be much more likely to remain in the Houses they were assigned.

The majority of students who would benefit from a zoning system would be the more typical blocking groups, made up of diverse members, representative of a wide variety of academic and extracurricular activities. Adding the option for blocking groups to pair off into zones would make what has traditionally been a stressful process for all a great deal less frightening.