Freshmen and the Houses

After years of debate over how best to assign freshmen to the Houses, the Deans last spring pulled the worst possible compromise out of their hats. Beginning this year a nine-man Faculty committee, including four Deans, will make all decisions on the distribution of freshmen; neither students nor Faculty will be formally asked to state their preferences. If a freshman has a "substantial reason" for prefering one House over the others, he must write a letter to Dean Monro stating it. The Masters, similarly, will be "free to inform the committee of general manpower needs they would like to have considered, as well as particular students they may hope to have assigned to them."

The old system--with required choice of three Houses by each freshman, selection of most freshmen by the Masters, and assignment of the rest from a pool--was certainly far from desirable. It wasted the Masters' time, forced freshmen to spend too much time choosing among the Houses, and caused one or two Houses to suffer long periods of unpopularity.

Hard as it is to believe, the new plan looks worse. Its only virtue is that it frees the Masters' time. Beyond that, it has substantially eliminated student choice, for very few freshmen are likely to be committed enough to one House to write Dean Monro a letter. Furthermore, as one Master commented last spring, the new plan may lead to a massive system of string-pulling. If a freshman happens to know the right people, he may be included on a Master's list of requests; if not, he is unlikely to have a good enough reason to convince the Deans that he should be in a particular House.

Another fault of the new plan is that the individual Houses will probably lose their images, one element of the House system worth preserving. Equal distribution according to Rank List, school background, and field of concentration, with no provision for Masters' and students' choices, may diminish the particular character of each unit.

One reason for the weakness of the plan is the University's mysterious dread of using computers. A Faculty Committee report of two years ago recommended computer-assignment under another plan, but the University, fearing adverse student reaction, turned it down. Whatever the merits of the plan, the University should not have rejected computerization, which would save everybody weeks of paperwork.

The newly-appointed Committee on House Assignments will soon begin meetings to fill in the details of the new policy. It should recommend prompt transition to computer tabulation, which nevertheless allows both student and Master to retain optional choice. A plan advanced by the Harvard Undergraduate Council last spring, for example, would permit students to rank as many or as few Houses as they wish, and Masters to request as many students as they wish. Then the choices would be matched by a computer, which would also consider distribution along the traditional lines. In this way, a maximum number of choices could be handled in the shortest possible time.