Housing

WHEN A HOUSING system reaches the point where it no longer serves the people who fall under its authority, one thing becomes clear: The system must be changed.

This year, the annual wave of disappointment prompted by freshman housing assignments reached crisis proportions. For the first time since coresidency began, most freshmen were denied their first-choice House, and the largest number ever -- over 15 per cent -- have been denied admission to any of the five Houses to which they applied.

The overwhelming evidence indicates that this year is not just one rotten exception in a series of smoothly-engineered seasons of housing placement. The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life has persisted in upholding a system of ineffective social engineering that will only grow more complicated and less manageable as the demands of new generations of bureaucratic manipulators are added to it.

The system as it is presently constituted has one basic flaw which will keep it generating disappointed crops of students year after year. This flaw is the quota system. Under the quota system, individuals' House preferences are ignored if they don't fit into the right criteria concerning high school background, area of concentration, and rank in class.

The philosophy behind this system is that every House should have the same mix of public school and private school graduates, of scientists and humanists, and of academic brightness and benightedness. If these quotas are used, the theory goes, no House will be stereotyped as a preppie House or a pre-med House, a jock House or a wonk House.

Unfortunately for its planners, this system has not destroyed House stereotypes. Because stereotypes are formed primarily from people's imagination -- and not from statistical charts and tables -- Houses will continue to bear certain reputations.

But besides failing at its stated goal, the quota system has one strongly negative side effect: It forces people to live in Houses, they don't want to live in.

Thus some students have found that while they applied to an undersubscribed Radcliffe House first choice, they were put in enormously oversubscribed Lowell House which was their third or fourth choice. Freshmen who were rejected from Eliot House and put in Mather House find themselves trading tales of woe with Eliot House applicants assigned to Mather House.

None of these people would have been unhappy if Harvard could only swallow its pride and follow the example of its rival in New Haven. At Yale, all of this nonsense is avoided by assigning each freshman to one of Yale's colleges (their word for Houses) when they first enter the university. At the same time, Yale allows easy transfers between colleges so that students can live with friends they make who happen to have been placed in other Yale colleges.

The effect of this system has been to reduce the importance of dormitory assignments. If Harvard were to adopt such a plan, the differences between the Houses would probably seem as small as the differences between the Yard dorms.

Freshman would not build up hopes and expectations at the end of their first year, only to have these hopes shot down by a pointless quota system. And the stupid sham of House selectivity would be ended. Surely Harvard is a selective enough place already without having to make its students go through other processes of application, admission and rejection within the institution.

Housing should not be a central concern of any student's undergraduate career. The differences between the Houses are slight and for the most part unimportant. But the current system in which students are urged to subject the Houses to close scrutiny and decide which one is best only accentuates petty differences and exaggerates the importance of housing placement.