End of Experiment

The new machinery for House selection has had its trial run. The Committee on Houses fed the Class of 1969 into one end, and out the other came nine roughly equal packages ready for fall delivery.

But the system has not worked nearly so well as its proponents hoped it would. The grumblings and confusion that have accompanied the process of assignment this year demonstrate that centralized planning is no panacea. The new system has created as many problems as it has solved.

The difficulty lies in balancing the twin ideals of reasonably well-rounded Houses and reasonably satisfied students. The old method of assignment sent the majority of freshmen where they wanted to go, but each Class showed a disturbing tendency to crowd into a few popular Houses. The less glamorous Houses virtually had to shanghai their share of people.

This year, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. The Committee, by taking over the job, achieved an even distribution of the freshman class among the Houses. Each House got a fairly uniform sprinkling of scholars, athletes, actors, and writers. But to even out the allocations, the Committee had to ignore almost all the letters of preference and distribute the freshmen arbitrarily. A great deal of hope was pinned on the letters to preserve a degree of student choice in the final assignments. But something went wrong. The Committee isn't talking. Chances are that it received so many letters that only those with the most compelling reasons for requesting a specific House could be honored.

The arbitrariness of the new system is, in its own way, as serious a fault as the distortions of the old. Student preference should be given a considerable amount of free play, not because of any mystical value intrinsic to choice but because students naturally want to have something to say about where they will be spending the next three years.

In addition, assignment by mere quotas has definite liabilities. There is something unsavory in the practice of sending students to a particular House simply because they fall into the category of athlete, actor, or what-have-you. Freshmen are likely to feel indignant at being Labelled as a certain type and assigned where that particular commodity happens to be in demand. Quotas existed under the old system, but at least the effort was made to fill them for each House with people who wanted to go there.

Finally, arbitrary assignment means that the great majority of sophomores entering a House will feel no attachment to it. They will simply be repeating the process of walking into their freshman dorms for the first time. A lack of identification with the House discourages participation in the House's activities. Even if each House has an equal share of talent, there is no guarantee that the students will choose to pursue their interests in their own House and not somewhere else.

Some aspects of the new system may have been unjustly maligned. Despite wild rumors, there is no evidence that the Committee dumped huge blocs of athletes or any other category of freshmen into particular Houses. Just the same, the system was an unsuccessful experiment, failing to balance the claims of student preference against those of the Houses' welfare. The Committee should continue to experiment, but the first step must be an upgrading of choice in next year's plan.