Freshmen Accept House Assignments With Cool, Sophistication, and Dismay

A team of University caretakers stalked through the Yard in pre-dawn darkness Saturday morning to deliver House assignments to the class of 1971.

Some freshmen, predictably, reacted with dismay. "They put me in Eliot," one cried. "Eliot! Can you believe it? Preppies live in Eliot."

Others were sophisticated and blase. "The House system is no big thing," a freshman said. "I don't care what House I'm in. A House is only a place where you sleep."

All the same, this year's assignments were probably the most successful in some time. Sixty per cent of the 1144 freshmen got into their first choice Houses, Dean Watson said yesterday, and more than 88 per cent got into one of the four Houses they requested.

The assignment system was the same as last year, Watson said. Each freshman indicated his first four choices, and was able to write a letter to Watson detailing special reasons for him to be in his first choice House.

"It was a very healthy year, Houses were not as oversubscribed or underscribed as in the past, Watson said. He added that statistics on the relative popularity of Houses are kept confidential. "I think freshman are making their choices more intelligently than they have before," he said. "We are also lucky that many freshman applied in groups of eight or nine and said, 'Put us anywhere you like. We just want to be together.' That made the assignments much easier."

"Aim to Please"

After the freshman indicated their four choices, he explained, the House Assignment Committee--a standing committee of the Faculty--set to work. "Our first aim is to please the students," Watson said, "but we have to stay within certain limits." Each House, for example, has a rank list quota to determine the minimum number of students from each academic "group" the House must admit.

The other specific quota, Watson said, is for secondary school backgrounds. Each House must take a set number--determined as a percentage of its vacancies--of freshmen from each of four school backgrounds: "traditional preparatory schools," which Harvard has been close to for years; Exeter and Andover; "other" private schools; and public high schools.

The Assignment Committee takes many other factors into consideration, Watson said, in order to achieve a balance among the Houses. A student's predicted rank list (a measure of how well the Deans expect him to do in his four years), his field of concentration, his athletic and extracurricular activities, and the personal evaluation of his proctor and senior advisor all become part of a freshman's folder.

Scatter the Armenians

The Committee does not specifically look for balance of black students among the Houses, Watson said. "But we obviously wouldn't want to have 25 Negroes in one House and none in the next--just like we wouldn't want to group 25 Armenians in one House."

Watson considers the present system "much stronger" than systems used in the past. Two years ago, for example, a freshman could only express preference for a House in a personal letter to the Dean of Students--who would only consider the letter if it presented "valid and substantial" arguments.