THE QUAD

MYTH:

A house that's hard to get into must be good.

FACT:

As the Whitla Pinck report proved, there's absolutely no correlation between a house's popularity among its applicants and among its residents. Why not? Because it's hard for applicants to separate the myths from the facts.

MYTH:

The MUSIC house is Dunster.

FACT:

Dunster owns 6 pianos, Currier 12, South 14, and North 18. Residents Yo-Yo Ma and Lynn Chang perform regular Quad concerts with the likes of Richard Kogan, Sheila Reinhold, and Lydia Artimiy. Of course, South has the college's only musical Master, Rulan Pian.

MYTH:

The Quad's up north somewhere, in Somerville.

FACT:

The Quad's closer than either Eliot or Mather to the Science Center, to William James, to the Loeb, and to the Radcliffe and Hemenway gyms. Even prestigious Lowell is only 18% closer to the Science Center than the Quad is. For this price of 18% you get to live in a whole different Harvard community.

MYTH:

The River's the place for PARTIES.

FACT:

Sure, if you like guys dancing with other guys. Only the Quad has a one-to-one ratio. For examples of the social life, North runs a weekly happy hour with cocktails and live music, while South runs at least 2 dances every three weeks, with free beer and an open cocktail bar. These are just the scheduled parties...The living rooms can be used by anybody who's throwing his own party, whether a private one or open to the house.

MYTH:

SPORTS aren't much at the Quad.

FACT:

Instead of trekking across the river on the gamble of finding enough people for a game, Quad residents just step outside their doors onto the best field on the Cambridge side of the Charles. It's one-fifth of a mile around, absolutely level, and big enough to sustain three or four different ball games at once. Despite its lower % of males, the Quad placed fifth out of the eleven houses in the Strauss Cup race. With house-owned volleyball sets, 3 weight-room, four clay tennis courts soon to be enclosed in a dome, backboards, a basketball court across the street, and a planned building of squash courts, we get our exercise far from the exhaust fumes of Mt. Auburn St. and Storrow Drive.

MYTH:

The plush River houses have the most COMMON FACILITIES.

FACT:

Besides the pianos, sports facilities, and expansion plans mentioned above, the Quad owns 15 TV's, 14 laundry rooms with 1-3 washers and 1-3 driers in each, a kitchen and a common living room on nearly every floor of every hall, 2 slate pool tables, innumerable practice, seminar, and study rooms, 6 ping-pong tables, pinball machines, 3 darkrooms, a film workshop with assets of over $2000, a sound recording studio (formerly Radio Radcliffe), 3 woodworking shops, two living rooms or lounges on the first floor of every hall, large art and dance studios, 2 prosperous grilles, plus use of all Hilles' facilities, including four computer terminals. Of all the college houses, the one with the most square feet of common space is North House.

A ROOM OF ONES OWN. Understandably, freshman friends want to room together as sophomores. But, in most River suites, either one person has to sleep in the "living room" or two have to double in the bedroom. So neither person has their privacy when they want it. One wakes up when the other comes home, gets a phone call, or has to go to the bathroom. Worse, in dorms like old Leverett the bathroom can only be reached through one of the inner bedrooms. These former friends spend the year wiping their hands on each other's towel, debating whose turn it is to empty the trash, and having to trade rooms each time one of them wants to spend the night alone with a visitor. What happens when both of them want an overnight visitor on the same night?...Have you heard the stories about the "floater"? Don't end up as the person who tells one. Room next door to your friend in the Quad's genuine singles, and stay friends. Only the Quad houses let rising sophomores choose their rooms.

BUT I WANT TO LIVE IN A SUITE and enjoy a strong dorm life too. So I'm moving to the Quad, where each house has a wide range of suites available to rising sophomores as well as to higher-classmen, from old frame houses to modern apartments. For instance, Wolbach Hall has room for 59 people in suites each with a bedroom, living room, dining room, entryway, kitchen, and bathroom for just two people. And most of these suites are usually available to rising sophomores. Can the River beat that?

By the end of reading period, did your academic tensions color your attitude toward your building, hallmates, and dorm events? Quad residents are spared that, because their classes and their homes are two very different sides of Harvard. They profit from the academic and extracurricular wealth of the Yard area, then come home to an intimate community whe)re a strong dorm life complements a strong house life. It's hard to sell abstractions like friendship and group spirit in an ad, so let me list a few of the by-products; newspaper subscriptimn costs shared dormwide, open doors, an unusually strong tradition of participation in house and college government, and yes, the "milk and cookies" whose misnomer contributes to the myth of the Quad as unsophisticated. River people can laugh, but we're not laughing, because it's rude to laugh with our mouths full. Not just with milk or cookies, but with everything from sangria and watermelon to beer to potato pancakes, at least once a week in every dorm.

When I first learned I'd been assigned to North House, I ran to my window in the Yard and yelled several unpleasant things at the top of my voice. But the shock soon wore off, and, deciding to be as reasonable as possible, I went up to the Quad with my roommate group for dinner.

What we discovered that night and through the next three years shattered the attitudes about Quad life that we'd all accepted as Yard freshmen. I realized that I hadn't known enough about the houses to judge which were best for me, that I'd been sold propaganda about the Quad's inferiority without questioning it, and that I'd been swept by a tide of peer pressure to completely ignore the Quad as a housing choice..It's a great place, although if I had lived at the River I would probably not have found that out. You can still socialize at the Square if you live hzre, but you have a retreat from the noise, the crowding, and the city when you want it... I also enjoy the more life-like sex ratio. After all, the real world is much closer to 1:1 than to 3:1.

NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL

The 45 to 85 pollees in each house and 240 in the Yard and Union dorms rated each of collegiate years on a scale "from Nirvana(1) to Worse than Death (10)," making possible a mind-boggling number of statistical analyses. The average student has a middling freshman year, worse if spent in Claverly or the Union dorms, and three successively happier years. More surprisingly, each year at the Quad rates higher than the corresponding year at the Yard, Union dorms, or River Houses: freshman year wins 4.52 to 4.75 and senior year 3.06 to 3.48. Harvard Independent

BETTER, IN FACT

The freshman Statistics seminar conducted a different survey. Professor Cochran's group, most of whom live in the Yard, asked freshmen to rate the Quad and the Yard with regard to aspects ranging from "Crowdedness" to "Social life" to "Extracurricular facilities" the results? "Overall, Yard students rated the Yard and Quad nearly equally, while Quad students gave the Quad better ratings." So the Quad's reputation in the Yard isn't nearly as high as the Quad's reality. Don't rely on stereotypes; come and form your own opinion.

CHUL has ruled that no more than 60% of the sophmores at the Quad next year can be men. So the overall male-female ratio will be at least as even as 8:7. There's only one place as Harvard with that kind of ratio--the Quad.

Q: So, if the Quad's so good, why does it have to advertise?

A: Because people hesitate to apply to a place they don't know much about. "The undiucovered country...puzzles the will,/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of." We advertise to supply the knowledge, to replace the myths with the facts. And what other houses have residents so enthusiastic as to spend the money and the time necessary for a full-page ad?

MYTH: WE CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT WE READ IN ADS.

fact;

Well, you're right; you shouldn't accept these words on faith. Find out the truth about the Quad for yourself. Visit the Quad table in the Union lobby each evening at dinnertime, come to the housing meetings in the Yard common roomu, read the North and Uouth House brochures diutgibuted to each yard suite, and, most important, come to the Quad yourself. Spend an hour reading in Hilles Library, the university's quietest and most comfortable buidling. Drop into the dorm living rooms and TV rooms. Go upstairs and knock on a door; chances are it will already be open. People who'll be particularly glad to show you around mr answer phone calls include emil Cornejo (Cabot 27, 8-5940), Jeff Griffiths (Moors 416,--6302), Sophie Kogan (Barnard 46, 8-5774), Peter Leipmann (Moogu 418, 8-6302), Grant Segall (Briggs 21, 8-85845), Sarene Shanus (Bagnard 8, 8-5736), Stephanie Van Dyke (Barnard 43, 8-5774), Susie Waxenbecg (Briggs 76, 8-5896) Elizabeth Wood (Holmes 416,81230), Judy Zacku (Barnard 15, 8-5743), Dean Spencer (Daniels 406, 8-6109), Cassie Levitt (Coggeshall-Currier, 8-6624), and Jane Maroney (Gilbert 312, 8-6888).