Transferring Troubles

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The article on Dudley House and transfer students in your February 25 issue continues your trend of bringing to attention the unique difficulties transfer students face at Harvard. Dave Sugrue eloquently describes the life of a transfer student, a situation I am very familiar with, having myself transferred here in the fall of '86. Though the situation of transfer students has vastly improved in the past year, major problems still exist for them.

The housing issue is paramount among the many problems transfers face. Though all transfer students are offered housing through the affiliated housing policy, much of the housing is located in distant and isolated areas such as Peabody Terrace and Botanical Gardens. As David indicated in his article, these are the "dull edges of the Harvard Community."

Because much of Harvard life centers around the house community, transfers are left out in the cold. Though Dudley House manages to form a cohesive community, the house is limited in numbers and in resources, financial and facility-wise. If the idea of admitting transfers is for greater diversity, how can the College benefit by segregating them?

This past fall, I was informed that due to overcrowding I would have no chance of moving into my house until next year at the earliest. After hearing this news, I went to University Hall and asked if I would be allowed to transfer to a house that had space. The Housing officer told me that I had not spent the necessary two terms of residence in a residential house to be allowed to transfer interhouse. I was thus stuck with living off-campus for another of my few years at Harvard because I had chosen a crowded house. Why she allowed David to transfer without the two terms prerequisite is beyond me. If some of the houses are undercrowded, it would be best to let transfer students move into them. That's what happened for David; he transferred from a crowded house to one with space. My concern is how the rules can be bent for some people and not others.

The housing policies are frequently very arbitrary and change from house to house depending on the whim of the individual housing officers. My house has the policy of giving transfer students first priority for available housing. David could transfer to a less-crowded house; I couldn't.

Despite what the Housing officer told me, there was room in the house ever since last fall. The room I am living in now had been unoccupied for practically all of last term, yet when I was calling the Housing officer every other week during the fall about my chances for moving into the house, she consistently told me there was no space whatsoever. Only this January did she inform me that there were a few spaces available for transfers to move into. When I asked her why I was not told about this space in October, she told me that she liked to keep a few empty spaces in the house for emergencies.

Her little habit had forced me to pay for an apartment that had a rent twice as expensive as on-campus housing and had kept me from living in a house for half my time at Harvard.

David was lucky to find space in Mather. I am also lucky to be living in a house finally. However, for many other transfers, their waiting is not yet over. For sophomore transfers, each year off-campus is a third of their time at Harvard. For junior transfers, it can be half of their time. Of course, living on-campus is not the nirvana of Harvard existence, but arbitrarily denying transfer students a chance to live on-campus when space is available is not justifiable. I hope that space will not continue to be jealously hoarded by Housing officers while transfers suffer. Timothy Tow '89