House Plan or House Plant?

Basing their choice on an optional meal in its dining hall, on optional conference with members of its staff, the reputation of its food, the pleasantness of its view, and the convenience of its location, Yardlings will make up their minds within the next few weeks to spend the next few years, not in a House of the type President Lowell envisaged, but more in a sort of glorified dormitory. The Houses are dormitories in so far as they furnish shelter and food; they are glorified in so far as they do so resplendently. And they are not Houses in so far as they fail, with minor exceptions, to supply any form of extra-curricular intellectual activity.

It was just this type of activity that was the core of the original House Plan. Students were to find in their House closer contact both with each other and with members of the Faculty, thereby adding another dimension to the lecture system of education. Tutorial lay at the heart of the plan, and it is the tutorial system's current dehydrated state that has caused the loss of much of the value of the Houses. The method by which students will choose their House reflects this state: in the thirties interviews with staff members of both first and second choices were compulsory, while today they are purely optional. With the Houses themselves failing to advertise their intellectual equipment, and with tutorial in general no longer looming large in every student's plans, it is only natural that this year's choices be made on the strength of the superficial, dormitory merits of the Houses.

If the Houses had attempted some constructive program of their own to substitute for formal tutorial, this situation would not exist. In the thirties, with the tutorial system flourishing, there was little for the Houses to do, although even then a Crimson editorial deplored their "utter disregard for the extra-curricular but still intellectual side of undergraduate life." Today, with their failure to organize small, departmental discussion groups, to encourage more than the occasional forums held in two of the Houses, in short, to fill in the educational holes caused by a threadbare tutorial system, this "utter disregard" has become more basic than the flaw it was in 1938. It is forcing the first regular postwar class applying for admission to the Houses to do so only on the basis of their merits, not at all as Houses in the prewar sense, but as mere physical plants.