Much Ado, And Then Nothing

After almost a year of investigation and deliberation, the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) last Wednesday voted to leave the housing situation unchanged, except to recomment to Dean Rosovsky that he raise the Quad sex ratio from 1:1 to 1.5:1.

CHUL will recommend that all Quad Houses remain four-year Houses in contrast to the three-year River Houses, and that the present system of choice be retained. This year, freshmen will once again rank the 12 Houses in order of preference and then anxiously await the out-come of a random assignment process that grants most roommate groups their first choice but inevitably bestows upon some their eleventh or twelfth choice.

At earlier meetings, CHUL dispensed with most of the "radical" proposals to change the Quad, insuring by last Wednesday that the status quo would not be changed.

Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the faculty and chairman of CHUL, may have been too generous when he said after Wednesday's meeting that the CHUL had failed to "come to grips" with the housing issue. Perhaps he should have added that CHUL had only aggravated the problem.