Room for Doubt

The standardization of Radcliffe room rates, ostensibly a democratic move to end discrimination against girls who formerly could not afford higher priced housing, may well be President Bunting's first big mistake. Timed unfortunately to coincide with the tuition rise, the change swells by $100 the price of economy doubles and rooms in cooperative houses. For non-scholarship students who depended on low-cost housing to make ends meet, standardization of room rates may be the final straw in the financial burden. Radcliffe's none-too-extensive financial resources may not even stretch to save scholarship students who need an increase in aid to match that in fees.

Because of the College's severe room shortage, equal prices may lead to a wholly unsatisfactory and unfair system of room distribution. With singles and economy doubles uniformly priced, many students are determined to live alone. Since the College hasn't enough singles to go around, most dorms are instituting a class quota system and with the lucky winners chosen by lot, many seniors writing theses and girls psychologically unprepared for crowding may nevertheless forced to couple up.

In view of the shortage, Radcliffe's tentative plan to turn four small off-campus houses (Henry, Lancaster, Jarvis 13, and 13A) over to graduate school students seems mistaken. Although old and far from the Quad, these houses contain a number of singles which would case the room problem considerably. Radcliffe officials explain that with the new co-operative houses opening in September, the four houses in question will no longer be strictly necessary. The possibility of relieving rather than perpetuating the cramped conditions seems, to them, secondary.

This hardly ideal situation is further complicated by such parameters as a markedly divergent quality of rooms in various dorms. The standardization of room rents, in theory a fine idea, is in practice a poor one. Entangled as it must inevitably be in the College's perennial problems of overcrowding and the differences in room quality, equal room prices end one discriminatory practice only to create a flock of others.