Russian Roulette

After implying for several years that a computer handles the freshmen House lottery from beginning to end, University officials admitted on Thursday that a portion of the housing assignment is done by hand, raising questions about the possibility of human error in the lottery.

Although a computer does assign random numbers to each housing group or bloc, housing officials complete the process by actually sorting the rooming cards into piles, one for each house, officials said.

Thomas A. Dingman '67, assistant dean of the College, who participated in the sorting process this year, said Thursday that statements in a letter explaining the lottery process he wrote to freshmen this year were "incorrect and misleading" because they imply that the entire assignment process is conducted by computer.

A memo written by the former computer programmer of the lottery stated categorically that officials run part of the lottery manually--and it suggested that officials use certain procedures, such as flipping a coin, in parts of the assignment process.

After Dean Fox, Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation, Dingman, and other housing officials admitted that the human hand intervened in the housing assignment process, further questions about the possibility of secret manipulations within the process arose.

The administrators and officials denied allegations by several students and student groups that the lottery has ever been fixed. In addition, they announced that neither man nor machine will reassign Houses for the Class of '82 because, as Dean Fox said, "We would get the identical results."