Housing: Segregating freshmen and sophomores could ghetto-ize the House system

I was pleased to read in the April 14 Crimson of your overriding concern for educational considerations in evaluating Harvard's residential system. However, on the basis of my experience here, both within South House and in other offices and activities. I cannot agree with the enthusiasm you expressed for the latest proposal of the Overseers' Visiting Committee on the Harvard-Radcliffe Relationship to house all freshmen at the Radcliffe Quadrangle and all sophomores in Harvard Yard.

I sincerely believe that class-segregated housing is inconsistent with the goals of a Harvard education in the 1970's. Such a plan would form a serious obstacle to the long-term goals enumerated by University officials in recent months.

On the most simplistic level, it is difficult to comprehend how such segregation will promote increased integration of freshmen for sophomores) into the University as a whole, a goal articulated repeatedly by such persons as Dean K. Whitla. On the contrary, I feel that such a plan would only exacerbate the problems which already exist in the all-freshman Yard as presently constituted.

From a strictly academic standpoint, I fear that the total isolation of freshman would have a disastrous effect. Several recent studies and Faculty communications have noted the lack of faculty student contact, particularly within the Houses. With the exception of the very small minority of Faculty members involved in the Freshman Seminar program, freshmen for the most part see much less of senior faculty than do upperclassmen.

This is understandable: freshmen are not yet members of departments. Just as professors tend to devote more attention to graduate students than to undergraduates, feeling them to have demonstrated more devotion to their specific academic pursuits, so they devote more time to upperclassmen in advanced research than to freshmen in introductory lectures. Similarly, it is the committed upperclass concentrators and graduate student tutors who attract professors to the Houses for courses, special interest tables, and the like.

My most strenuous objection to the proposed system concerns counseling and advising services, both formal and informal. In his recent Letter to the Faculty on Undergraduate Education, Dean Rosovsky stated that "advising is the essential catalyst of our educational system." The residents of the Radcliffe Quadrangle, with its involved tutors and four-class population, have repeatedly stressed the excellence of the advising system there. Dean Rosovsky acknowledges that the University suffers from a general problem of communications, noting particularly that "The official counseling tradition at Harvard is distinctly non-directive, though this is not true of the many informal information networks."

Beginning with Freshman Week, when South House operates a highly successful Senior Sibling program (the coed successor to "Big Sister"), and continuing throughout the term, it is such advising which constitutes the principal advantage of the four-class set-up.

Contact is informal; advice ranges from where to buy a lampshade or the best pizza to guided tours of Courses of Instruction to the drying of tears of homesickness. On the academic level, sign-up sheets are posted in each dorm on which upperclassmen list the courses they have taken. These resources lists have proved an invaluable source of information to freshmen (and to other upperclassmen).

In a less organized fashion, upperclass guidance continue at the Quad throughout the year. This is particularly evident when freshmen choose concentrations in the spring.

In my experience as chairman of the South House Senior Sibling program, the freshmen at the Quad have experienced much less "culture shock" in adjusting to Harvard than have their isolated contemporaries in the Yard. We have found that the simple realization not only that one's problems are not unique (all freshmen discover that, and many panic), but more importantly, that others have been able to solve them satisfactorily, is immensely supportive.

In short, four-class living provides freshmen with a taste of upperclass sanity, based on experience, which has proved itself to be reassuring, at the very least, to those adrift in what may be a very turbulent sea called Harvard.

On an equal level with the many benefits which freshmen derive from the presence of upperclassmen in the residential environment are the advantages afforded to the upperclassmen themselves. While a certain amount of quiet and isolation for upperclassmen writing theses or pondering the uncertainties of life after Harvard is definitely desirable and indeed necessary. I feel that this objective is attainable within a four-class living situation. In all fairness, consideration for others' work habits does not necessarily correlate with one's age or class."

As I'm sure staff members of Room 13 will agree, informal counseling is beneficial in both directions in providing perspective on one's college education and on life in general. If I had less respect for the privacy of my friends, I would quote specific examples of advice which I, as a freshman, received from upperclassmen and have since, as an upperclassman, been able to pass on to freshmen (and other upperclassmen). Such advice has been academic, extra-curricular, and personal. And, I might add, much of it, having been based on prior college experience, could not have been given to me by another freshman.

Career counselors increasingly stress the necessity of working with "difficult" people or those who are in some way different from ourselves. In view of the current broadening of the workforce to include people of more diverse ages, particularly women, an ability to deal with people of all ages is essential. While an age differential within an undergraduate House of one, two, three, or possibly a few more years is not large numerically. I think most of us would agree that the gap in maturity is far from insignificant. The challenge of living with those of other ages is, I believe, a valuable and potentially rewarding experience for all. And a certain amount of "self-sacrifice," if the label must go to that extreme, might not be such a terrible fate for upperclassmen.

President Bok has encouraged that arts on the ground that they are "more than simply an intellectual discipline. They cultivate sensitivity and imagination." I submit that four-class interaction on the residential level is another vital route to this objective. If Harvard is sincere in its commitment to the education of total people, not merely scholars, then its residential system must be consistent with its educational philosophy.

Helen H. Gilbert '36, chairman of the Overseers' Visiting Committee on the Harvard-Radcliffe Relationship, admits that the house all sophomores in the Yard is "the weakest link of the whole proposal." To me, this is the epitome of understatement. As the South House Committee wrote in its letter of April 16th to Mrs. Gilbert, "the present house system integrates sophomores in the only meaningful sense; it places them in full social contact with students of other classes." The "special efforts which Dean Pipkin envisions as necessary if all sophomores were to live in the Yard are not now required. The Whitla-Pinck report, Perspectives on the Houses at Harvard and Radcliffe, states, "No student ought to live in a House merely for the sake of bed and board and to study and enjoy his university life elsewhere." This has been the chief virtue of the House system since its inception.

The resultant restriction of the Houses to only two undergraduate classes clearly presages the death of the House system. It is often an academic necessity for seniors involved in the rigors of thesis research to withdraw for a substantial portion of the year from extra-curricular pursuits. The result, under the proposed system, would be the placing of an undue burden of organization and participation in House functions on the junior class as well as a denial of a good measure of the diversity for which Harvard so ardently strives.

Moreover, full psychological attachment to a House, or to any organization, for that matter, takes time. Under the present system, students are members (not merely residents) of Houses for three, or even, in some cases at Radcliffe, four years. The vital and exciting programs and activities now happening in the Houses are the result of a fairly stable residential population. At present, only one-third of each River House changes each year: a slightly higher turnover is found at the Quad because freshmen are housed there. Under the proposed plan, turnover would be fifty percent each year. Continuity of residence, with the concomitant sentiment of membership, is the only basis for commitment to a House. Having moved three times during his or her college career. I maintain that a student will develop no true House loyalty, and that the "small college within a large university" concept would therefore be doomed.

At the Radcliffe Quadrangle, the old individual forms have been institutionally if not architecturally amalgamated into two Houses, North and South. On the official Harvard University map, the label "Radcliffe Dormitories" has recently been replaced by the more unified title of "Radcliffe Quadrangle." It is not the proper character of this or any university to be regressive; we cannot let the Houses at the river or the quad river to dormitories.

I am aware that Harvard alumni have historically cultivated "class spirit," so beautifully satirized by the caricatures of "professional alumni" in John P. Marquand's H.M. Pulham, Esq. Such esprit de corps has traditionally been used as a fund-raising vehicle, and for this reason, there has been considerable alumni opposition to the abolition of the separate freshman year. However despite the fondest wishes of the Development Office and the Harvard College Fund, the "class identity" which F. Stanton Deland '36, chairman of the Board of Overseers, exhorts is being considerably eroded by the taking of leaves of absence. In fact, recent statistics indicate that as many as 20 to 25 per cent of the students in each class take voluntary leaves in the course of completing degree requirements. Yes, official affiliation remains with one's entering class unless there is a specific request to the contrary, but after a leave one's peer group is bound to change at least partially, and one's psychological attachments, if not one's computer affiliation, are likely to change as well.

In this time of economic insecurity, the University is certainly in no position to weaken its financial base. But it has already recognized that the base of contributions must be widened. This is precisely the time to appeal to alumnae/I for funds, not on the basis of class identity, but on the basis of loyalty to the college or, if necessary, to an academic or institutional subset thereof. In his Letter to the Faculty. Dean Rosovsky bemoans the fact that the diversity of the students body, the size of the University, and its location in an urban environment have a "fragmenting effect" on the student body. The proposed residential isolationism would only hasten such fragmentation and would, in fact, carry it to a dangerous extreme.

This is in many ways a very personal statement of The Education of Nancy Toff--in a four-class Houses. It is an opportunity for which I am extremely grateful, and one which I would not want to see destroyed. I greatly appreciate the Radcliffe Trustees' openness and receptivity to students' thoughts and opinions, and look forward to further discussion of these issues.

...Enthusiastic about housing all freshmen in the Quad and all sophomores in the Yard.

Nancy Toff '76 is a junior living in Eliot Hall.