The Housing Mess, Revisited

If you listen closely as you pass University Hall today you are liable to hear a collective sigh of relief. It's the sigh that comes when you can give 130 freshman their bottom three House choices and still manage to avoid an insurrection.

"The vacation has definitely stymied as," Weld resident Jon Miller said yesterday about his attempts to organize freshmen who had been sent up to the Quad, even though the Quad Houses were among their three bottom choices.

"I'm stuck here for the moment," Diane Englander said about her foiled attempt to escape from South House to Lowell. "But I am going to try to move as soon as I can."

Although no one from the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life came out and said it after scrutinizing House figures compiled by Bruce Collier, assistant dean of the College for housing, most of the 130 who received their bottom choices will be rooming at the Quad next year.

But the problem runs deeper than the 8.8 per cent of the class who received their last three choices. Even though 67.8 per cent of the class received their first choice, down only a few percentage points from last year, University officials know that unless something is done soon there is a good chance that the same thing will happen next year.

"We can't tinker with the system any more," Dean Whitlock said last week. He voiced the opinion of many administrators who understand that the days of juggling sophomores in and out of the Hotel Continental, Claverly and Canaday Halls are over.

What many CHUL members do not want to face is that the University currently has a de facto double-standard House system, despite the 1972 merger agreement, which specifically calls for a unified House set-up.

And whether it be the 1:18-to-1 CHUL imposed ratio, the relatively shoddy facilities at the Quad, or the ten-minute walk that cuts them off from the rest of the University, something must be done to make the Quad Houses more attractive.

Even worse, it appears that both sexes are deserting the Quad in equal numbers.

The CHUL has tossed around the Yale plan, with students being assigned to Houses before they get here, for several years. But with the memories of 130 angry freshmen still fresh, and the knowledge that things may get worse before they get better, the CHUL at its April meeting may vote to enact a modified Yale plan for the Class of 1980.

The Yale plan has its demerits in that students would not be able to choose their Houses, but would be stuck where the University wanted them to be.

But then again, Harvard administrators know that the plan has an invisible merit that many of the other plans mentioned don't have--it's cheap.

Ostensibly, Houses stocked with students sight-unseen would give freshmen little gripes about being bumped out of their first few choices. It may even force students to take an interest in their Houses rather than spending four years trying to get out of them.

But underneath all the talk about the Yale plan's magic ability to make differences between Houses disappear within a few years is the large pile of money the University could save by not fixing up the Quad Houses. After all it is a lot easier to make students live at the Quad than to dress it up and then try to peddle it.