The House and the Houses

Some time in the all too near future the Radcliffe administration intends to tear down the frame houses which now stand between Garden Street and the Quad and to erect in their place a monumental concrete building designed to house three hundred students. In addition to destroying the grass in the Radcliffe area, this plan calls for the elimination of most if not all off campus living space.

The present living arrangements provide an avenue of escape for those girls who find oppressive the institutional atmosphere of the brick dormitories. The houses' size and freedom from organized meals give at least a few of the benefits of private houses. Recently a document protesting the destruction of the houses was posted both on and off campus. It attracted an impressive number of signatures--well over forty per cent in the dorms where it was posted. Even those who do not want to live off-campus are impressed with the value of the diversity of the present arrangement.

The new House, we are told, is to provide all the best features of off-campus living. The obstacles to this might to the untutored seem insurmountable: a concrete structure housing three hundred is fundamentally and unalterably different from a medium-size frame house. To deal with the size distinction, the Fourth House is to be broken down into units of forty to forty-five students, each equipped with common rooms and kitchenettes for student dinner parties. Even if a unit of forty-five did not provide an atmosphere close to that of the brick dormitories--the administration is relying on the climination of corridors to vanquish institutional atmosphere--it is certain that the entries will be relatively unimportant in determining House atmosphere. It is the dining facilities which determine where and how one rubs shoulders with the animate world, and Fourth House dwellers will eat en masse.

The House System is intended to provide the benefits of contact with faculty and facilities for seminars and extracurricular interests. These goals are certainly commendable but there exists reasonable doubt of the possibility of doing these things at Radcliffe. Until the present Houses, which include every girl at Radcliffe, can be shown to have succeeded in these endeavors, there is no sense in building another at great expense and inconvenience.

As Mrs. Bunting points out, the existing living arrangements at Radcliffe are crowded. But the elimination of over-crowding need not entail the elimination of off-campus houses. The addition of a few would do nicely.