On The House

The Houses, much like candidates for degree, conform to two requirements, those of distribution and concentration. As with the curriculum, distribution is embodied in a formula, which in this case seeks to guarantee that every type of student is represented in each House.

If one must be strict, the comparison ends there, for the College has never found it necessary to impose concentration on the Houses. Old traditions, abetted by inertia, have given each House unique characteristics, based more or less on the type of undergraduate who through the years has gathered there with greatest regularity.

Despite the frequent and occasionally justified complaints about over-concentration, and despite the few and mostly unjustified complaints about over-diversification, this balance has many advantages. Avoiding lopsidedness is of course imperative, since one of the greatest benefits a House can offer is the admixture of different backgrounds, interests, and academic pursuits. But it is quite as important to avoid a slide-rule approach. Rigorous application of the proportional representation theory would altogether deprive a House of what best might be called its social common denominator, which must be retained in some measure if Houses are to be fashioned into the social and academic centers they are meant to be.

Pages three, four, and five of this issue indicate to some degree how well the Houses have maintained this balance. In amongst the statistics, enumerations, and miscellancy, the essential differences between the Houses are outlined, some of them trivial, some important, and some undesirable. The differences in tone and traditions, in the interests and types comprising their memberships, are all to the good.

There are others, though, that are not so encouraging. One such is the differences is student-tutor relations, which unfortunately varies from House to House.

The new tutorial system, which takes effect next year, is bound to accentuate these differences, irrespective of their desirability. Especially sensitive will be the tutoring programs, which ideally should be of equal quality in each House.

Every characteristic will become more pronounced in the next few years. It is doubly important, then, to remove what undesirable disparities exist, and to tread yet more carefully the territory between over-concentration of membership and over-distribution.