Program Will Collect Finances For Married Students' Housing

A member of the Class of 1932, reading over the breakdown of the $82.5 million program for Harvard College, could conceivably be puzzled by a seven million dollar item marked "Houses' for Married Students."

Few graduate students were married during the Depression, for that matter, few were married until the post-World War II era. Before 1945 probably no higher than eight per cent of the students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences had wives.

Today the situation has undergone vast changes and raised pressing problems. More than one-third of the graduate students on this side of the Charles are married, and of that proportion, no fewer than 60 per cent have one child or more.

Although the University boasts the finest undergraduate housing of any college in the country, it can make no claim that its provisions for married students is anything above the national mean of appalling mediocrity.

In many ways the University does not even meet the average. Cambridge is a densely populated and somewhat down- at-the-heels urban area. Apartments are scarce and expensive. Schools are crowded and the victims of political exploitation. Playgrounds are few in number.

Into this uncordial environment, how ever, come increasing numbers of mar- ried students, hopefully seeking even minimal accomodations. Few find them, and many resort to outlying areas, miles from the Yard, where apartments are more numerous, if not any better.

To describe the average accomodations which the graduate student and his family settle for, J. P. Elder, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, states fiatly that they are "wretchedly sordid or impossibly located."

It terms of the married students them selves, the housing situation frequently means cultural isolation from the Harvard community. For the husband, it means constant commuting without even an academic surburbia to anticipate after a day's work in Widener. For his wife, it often means bleak isolation from social and cultural activities of the University.

It is, of course, impossible to determine how many desirable graduate students are dissuaded from applying to Harvard because of the acute housing problem. Dean Elder points out, however, that it is common knowledge that housing is easier to obtain and less expensive in smaller college towns than in urban areas such as Cambridge.

Probably the most alarming aspect of the housing shortage, at least from the undergraduate viewpoint, is the enormous educational loss to the college. More than one fourth of graduate students are engaged in teaching, either as laboratory assistants, section men, or tutors. These student-teachers are often segregated from students except when performing their formal classroom duties.

The most frequently voiced complaint which students make against Harvard education is "lack of contact" with the faculty--which, because they are teachers, includes graduate students. The current housing situation works directly against student-teacher contact.

Although the University hopes to find room in the new Houses (and subsequently in the older ones as they are reduced in size) for a respectable percentage of the graduates, the demands of space make it impossible to provide more than a very small number of suites for married students.

Therefore the solution which the University has adopted, and which President Pusey strongly champions, is construction, in Cambridge, of "Houses," (apartments) for at least 400 families. The Cost for such a project the University estimates at seven million dollars.

Although the Program for Harvard College admits that this will not solve the housing problem, it will make a sizeable dent both in itself and by easing the pressure on existing rentals.

Dean Elder, who had expressed hope for accomodations for 500 families, has greeted the Program's plan with "much good hope" as a start toward alleviating the problem which, as he says, "demands drastic remedies and quick ones."DEAN ELDER