Coeducation and Monasticism in the Houses

The distance from the Radcliffe Quad to the Harvard Houses is about a thousand years-from an experimental venture in education to a closed system that, in only thirty years is musty with tradtion and echoes of Oxbridge and medieval monasteries. That distance is now important to both Colleges, because Radcliffe's innovative approach poses a real challenge to the Harvard House system.

The Harvard system's view of women is a precise restatement of that held by the cloistered orders: women are objects of lust whose instrusion into a contemplative society destroys both tranquility and intellectual life. It follows that females should be barred not only from the bedroom, but from the dining halls. And most Masters regard allowing girls to dine in the Houses as just a special exceptions to the proper masculine atmosphere.

Watch what happens when a girl joins a table with a group of men who have been conducting a reasonably intellectual conversation, and you must understand the grounds of the Masters' attitude. Anyone who has dined at Radcliffe must have very modest hope that the situation would improve if girls were allowed in the Houses more frequently.

Yet the entire premise of the revolution now occurring at Radcliffe is that while women need not behave like men they deserve every opportunity open to men and are entitled to equal treatment, particuarly in an intellectual community. It simply will not do to say, "You are not equal now, so we will not treat you as equals."

The Masters may be quite correct about the effect girls have on life in the Houses, but their attitude is self-confirming; girls tend to be conservative and feminine if they feel conflicting demands are made. This is statistically demonstrable, but it is also intuitively evident: a girl who thinks people consider her less intelligent than men will incline to be less intellectual, particularly when men are about.

The Moral Argument

So far, however, it has not been necessary to express these attitudes toward women in explicit terms, because there are moral arguments available-arguments which have the disadvantages of prudery, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, but the overwhelming merit of evading the issue. It seems quite unlikely that, if parietal rules did not exist, twentieth-century Harvard would feel a moral need to impose them, but the rules are there and very convenient for the Masters.

The effect of parietal rules on the community is not pretty. A student who tries to discuss the regulations with members of the Administration finds it hard to believe that anyone-concerned has even a shred of rationality. It helps to remember that many of these men have teenage daughters, but the excuse is not really sufficient. Even Masters and Senior Tutors who do not respect the rules make no effort to improve them; they operate, instead, under a policy of convert contempt for them, which makes respect for rules and Masters even more difficult-the usual defense offered by those who favor marginal enforcement is that the rules must be on the books to prevent students making too much noise and invading the privacy of others. A student who knows he will be disciplined if caught with a girl in his room will not throw rowdy parties while she is present.

Radcliffe has challenged the Masters' moral posture by its evident determination to cut social rules to a very bare minimum-which will probably mean no rules at all within a decade. It is difficult for Harvard to maintain that Radcliffe really doesn't understand the temptations to which young couples are subject, or explicitly to reject Radcliffe's assumption that young ladies are competent to look after their own virtue. And since women have traditionally been the defenders of morality, it is a bit awkward to say that what is permissible by Radcliffe's standards is not to be allowed by Harvard's.

Threats of Restriction

The Masters have clearly felt this challenge, for this is the moment they have chosen to murmur about cutting back parietal hours, and the Administration has offered a measure of support for a student union-whose principal function would be to offer undergraduates a place to entertain girls and hence give the Administration an excuse for cutting the hours when girls may be in the Houses. The significance of these rumblings is not that Harvard will actually enact more conservative rules, but that the response of the Masters to Radcliffe's growing liberalism and self-confidence will be reactionary rather than cooperative. And it is in these terms that one may understand the Masters' rejection of proposals to let girls dine in the Houses more frequently. The Masters are not ready to reject explicitly Mrs. Bunting's-and President Pusey's-claim that Radcliffe is a full member of the Harvard community, but they have given their answer.

The Radcliffe Houses pose a more profound threat to the Harvard system by an essentially pluralistic approach. Harvard has discouraged all competition and differentiation among Houses; Radcliffe, like M.I.T., allows each dorm, to set its own parietial rules. Mrs. Bunting has affirmed her belief in competition, a geneticist's faith in separate evolution; Harvard refers such profound matters as wearing Bermuda shorts in dining halls to the Committee of Masters.

The monastic order does not compete with the outside world-one either believes in it or he does not. Novices do not live outside the monastery, and Harvard undergraduates do not live out of the Houses. Harvard has invested so much money and effort in its system of residential education that it is not inclined to let students opt out, any more than it would let them opt out of concentration. But this is only part of the explanation for the rule against living out-the other part is that the Houses are a monolithic conception of education, and the Masters have sufficient faith in that conception to feel that competition has no function except to diminish students' motivation. They believe, in addition, that most who want to escape the Houses really wish only to escape parietal rules, and their emotions about those rules are sufficiently confused so that their impulse is to prevent rather than to reexamine the system supporting those rules.

Administrative Insulation

The House System's unwillingness to accept diversity or competition is partly, too, a reflection of the Master's belief in a contemplative atmosphere undisturbed by any educational version of the free-enterprise system. But it also mirrors their administrative desire to be insulated from pressure for change-a pressure that might grow very substantial if each Master decided parietal hours, dining hall dress, or whether students were required to live within the walls of the House.

When the House system was founded, one of President Lowell's purposes was breaking the hold of the Final Clubs on the College, and winning the loyalty of Harvard's undergraduates to an academic university. A strongly focused program made sense in this context. But the House system today has succeeded overwhelmingly, and the live question is whether it can survive its success.

There is, of course, no doubt that the the Houses will survive as an institution for decades, no matter what. The problem will be adapting to a series of new situations. One is the changing role of women in the University. A second is that Harvard is attracting undergraduates who do not need to be forced into intellectual life.

There is a difference of kind between a House system designed to force intellectual life on prep school graduates who already have their eyes set on careers and places in society and a system for graduates of public or private schools who have been-propelled to Harvard by their unusual ability and the doctrine that "talent is our most important resource." If the Houses are to be more than the fraternities of the intellectuals, they must now find a way open themselves to the non-academic world. The academic profession is only one of many devoted to use of the mind, but this is hard to remember when every intelligent high-school graduate is expected to serve an academic apprenticeship by concentrating in a field and is immersed for four years in an-academic community.

Closed Systems

The solid closed system of the Houses forces visitors to meet its standards. Intellectually, a girl and corporation executive face exactly the same standards when they enter a House, standards particularly focused on a fast and rather flashy kind of verbal skill that is quite rare outside the academic world and its peripheries. These standards rapidly make the Houses and the college into a closed system that rarely meets outsiders on their own terms.

Girls, as Harvard men note with-occasional bitterness, get grades just as high as men, higher aptitude scores, and more departmental honors. Either the entire collegiate grading system is such a farce that it its mere-continuation is a positive evil, or else the College has failed to cope with a very able part of the coeducational community. It is not particularly to the credit of the House system that these girls find no place, or that it cannot draw their talents into the system. Couched in intellectual terms, this is shocking waste, but in terms of the House system, it is an impressive testimony to how completely the Houses out themselves off from parts of the community.

The challenge and adventure that confronts the Houses system is not consolidating its stature as a community of scholarly young men, but expanding the notions of intellect and the community of mind. The popularity of the Freshman Seminars among undergraduates should be an adequate index of the case with which Harvard can market the scholarly enterprise to its students, but this is the easiest of the College's tasks. In the last three-decades, the Houses have matured sufficiently to take the next step.

Out of the Cloister

To move beyond the monolithic House system and beyond the monastic initiation of young men, the Masters will need courage and humility: to believe that the life of the mind has vitality outside the cloister and to admit that the single system to which they have devoted themselves is not necessarily the best possible.

Part of the change will have to be an administrative revolution that virtually abolishes the College, giving each Master great autonomy in running his House and removing authority from the Committee on Houses and the Committee of Masters. Experiments with three thousand students are almost impossible; with three hundred, they are comparatively easy.

Another part will be bringing people into the House system who do not quite fit girls, to start with, perhaps, but many others as well. It would be fascinating, for example, to experiment with young law school gradutes resident in the Houses and more young doctors. There is no reason why young academics should compose even a majority of the House staff if others can be found.

Some Houses might experiment with loosening residence requirements. The exact pattern of change in individual Houses is not so important as the determination to use the strength of the Houses is a basis for serious and sharp innvotion. Otherwise Radcliffe will be only the first to discover that the Harvard Houses have been left behind in the age that is past.