'Average Man' Finds Home In Winthrop's Large Rooms

Present size of House: 380.

Vacancies for freshmen: about 100.

Rooms for freshmen: everything from one-man to five-man suites, more triples than anything else.

Price range of places for freshmen: $110 to $260 per term.

The cult of the average can claim at least one victory along the Charles. Winthrop House has a balanced student body, a cross-section of the Harvard community; it is the middle path--few backslappers and almost no "esthetic types."

Dr. Ronald M. Ferry '12 has learned to beat the system, to juggle the tables and applications so that his House has 350 normal, satisfied men each year. There is no trouble, no problem, no conflict.

The percentages are all correct by even the most rigorous standards of the cross-sectioners: the number of resident concentrators in each field parallels the amount in the whole College; the private and the public school men just about balance off.

Large Rooms

Winthrop is a House of average men, Harvard brand. It has the right degree of apathy, for example, toward the correct things. It doesn't worry too much about grades and produces relatively few Phi Beta Kappas or fellowship winners.

It has no really strong feelings, in fact. One could not pick an argument in its dining room over anything, least of all over modern music, modern art, or the modern novel. It is not a House of experts, nor a home of scholars. But it is not a refuge for joiners either.

So much for the inhabitants. The University's third largest House is well equipped and well appointed. Its rooms are among the largest in the College but avoid the height that usually accompanies width in Harvard buildings.

Since it faces no slums nor carbarns, these are no bad views; the suites look either upon the tree-lined walks of the triangle and the courtyard or upon the river and Memorial Drive.

For those who like diversion, the Puritans have varied activities and facilities: film groups, music societies, language clubs and all the rest. But, more than the usual House, Winthrop avoids pressuring residents to join anything. Winthrop offers peace and contentment to the students who value them.

Ferry has built up a good tutorial staff, especially in the sciences. Many of these men are available to students at all times and attempt to make dinner table instruction a fact. Others, however, are almost never seen in the newly-painted dining hall, feeling, perhaps, that the eager student will seek them out.

This is a House that asks no special qualifications, though athletics does help. This is a House that molds no one, but respects individual apathy and individual integrity alike.