Packing Them in

If you ask 12 different CHUL representatives which House is the most crowded, chances are you'll get 12 different answers.

On the other hand, if you ask Bruce Collier, assistant dean of the College and Harvard's statistical whiz-kid, how he determines the number of people to crowd in each House, chances are you won't be satisfied with his answer, assuming, that is, that you can understand it.

Actually, for those people who contend that their House "really is the most overcrowded," what is even harder than understanding Collier's mathematics is being able to see through them and argue against them.

Many irate students during the past week have wandered into Collier's office in the basement of University Hall convinced that their Houses are drastically more over-crowded than any other. Collier said those students usually leave his office persuaded that crowding is just as bad, if not worse, in the other Houses.

But several of his visitors have left with the impression that Collier is snowing them under with statistics, formulas, pain indices, ideal capacities, crowding quotients and everything else he uses to prove that crowding is equally distributed among all the Houses.

Although students in all Houses have complaints about the crowding situation in their House, Mather House residents have been by far the most vocal.

Last week the Mather Memo, the House newspaper, charged that Collier's method of determining the "pain factor" (the relative pain caused by crowding in each House) as the amount of floor space per capita illustrates that he is "totally divorced from the reality of the housing situation." The Memo editors were not swayed by Collier's explanations, calling them "the reasoning of a functional moron."

Collier responded to the Memo's claim that Mather House is "severely overcrowded" by saying Wednesday that Mather is actually "relatively less crowded" than any other House. Collier supports this statement by comparing the percentage of residents who exceed "ideal capacity" (the number of single bedrooms) in each House. For Mather this percentage is 14.6, a lower figure than that of any other House.

However, Mather students have vigorously challenged the validity of this percentage. Ken Josselyn '77, author of the Memo article, said the 14.6 figure is "fairly arrived at but meaningless" because the ideal capacity figure on which it is based is a biased one.

Mather House has fewer living rooms and more bedrooms than the other River Houses. Because Collier includes bedrooms in the ideal capacity figure, other Houses appear to be more crowded because their living room space is not taken into account.

Josselyn and others-including some people from the Winthrop House Committee who believe that their House was unfairly dealt with and is bearing too much of the crowding burden-are presently trying to compile a new set of identical capacity figures that will include the number of living rooms in each House.

These statistics may prove that Mather really is the most crowded House. However, all they will really show is that anyone can prove anything he wants with statistics. And that is something that any visitor to Bruce Collier's basement lair soon discovers.