When Appearances Mattered

While the efforts of the administration to influence the composition of Kirkland House raise an outcry today, 20 years ago the house masters had such greater freedom in choosing who would enter their domains.

Under the old system, in effect until the 1960s, freshmen formed rooming groups and ranked three houses, much as they do today, says A.M. Pappen-heimer '29, former master of Dunster House.

After the selections were sorted, masters interviewed the rooming groups to choose which ones they wanted in their houses. "One could see everyone who wanted to come into a house," says John H. Finley '25, the master of Eliot House during the 1950s and 1960s.

David T. Roy '58, now a professor of East Asian literature at the University of Chicago, says, he was interviewed together with his rooming group when they tried to get into Dunster House. "It was all kind of mysterious because you weren't told anything definite during the interview, like in a job interview."

According to former masters, the purpose of the interview was to help the masters maintain the diversity of the houses. "The masters agreed that every house would have a quota, so many people from the public schools, so many from Exeter and Andover, and so on," Pappenheimer says.

Finley recalls six groups which he tried to balance. "There were the very good students, the very high athletes, the fellows from the proper schools, the artistic ones, the hot and bothered ones [who] would go on to write for The Crimson, and the sixth were the presidents of classes of high schools somewhere in Indiana. These were the best."

When the groups who had selected a house did not offer the necessary diversity, masters would try to entice other students to come to their house. "Rooms differed, as did the costs, so you tried to compromise these considerations," says Finley.

Nonetheless, many of the top choice houses maintained specific identities just as they do today. Lowell's reputation as the traditional, intellectual house and Eliot's as the preppy house have remained constant, says Jeffrey E. Wills '80, assistant senior tutor in Lowell House. "Lowell might offer better rooms to entice intellectuals," Wills says.

Some house's reputations changed along with their masters. "Dunster was known as the party house," Roy says. But Pappenheimer says he tried to create "a sort of chamber music reputation" for Dunster.

"I don't think my house was a particularly popular one," he added. Before the construction of Mather and the integration of Radcliffe into the Harvard house system, Dunster was the most distant of the eight residential houses.

Like today's computer-generated lottery, internal room-selection lotteries are a new innovation. "People talk about 'the' room they had in college because they had it for three years," Wills says.

The system of keeping rooms for three years had its own problems. "It didn't always work that you could room with the people you wanted, for instance, if triples were not available," Roy says. Furthermore, a good room with a junior and a senior could be kept in the same clique for years, says Wills.

The master's interviews were just one aspect of a master-student relationship and house atmosphere that were much closer in those days, Finley says. "It wasn't the size, it was what one expected of a house," he says.

Roy, however, says that "Finley was famous as the master who paid the most attention to his house...The real person who set the tone of [Dunster] House was the senior tutor."