Don't Go All the Way

IMAGINING a community of perfect diversity, the staff opinion passionately plunges down the wrong course at the right time for the housing lottery.

By endorsing 100 percent randomization, the staff wraps itself recklessly in the banner of "diversity," carelessly applying a heavy-handed solution. It sacrifices the principle that a free, educated community can and should direct itself toward its own ideals--gradually if need be--for the illusion that tolerance can be manufactured virtually overnight, externally. For the sake of the symbolism of total randomization, it also sweeps aside serious problems with that plan.

Change in house assignment must take place now--on that, most informed College members agree. House stereotypes that are persistently repellent to large segments of first-year and upperclass students--athleticism, elitism or bohemianism--threaten to leave all students under-educated.

Other factors, such as academic performance, concentration choice or economic status, lead others to go further.

But the acknowledgment of difference is a far cry from declaring, "It's all or nothing in the housing lottery.

Only in extrem circumstances hould a community's right and responsibility to make its own informed decisions be denied. The house system does not yet pose us this crisis.

Indeed, proponents of 100 percent randomization do not claim to offer a cure-all for Harvard's problems of inequality; instead they implicitly argue broadly that randomization will give symbolic stature to the College's commitment to diversity.

BUT for this "all or nothing" symbolic victory, randomization would sacrifice much good in the community, without even guaranteeing that diversity's goals would be upheld. For nowhere in an incompletely diverse American can one find the road to equality perfectly paved over. It seems artificial, extreme, and self-defeating to attempt to do so so forcibly here, no matter how much we would like to do so.

The subtle irritation among the staff lies in the perception of persistent "types" of students--athletes in Kirkland, private school graduates and the wealthy in Eliot, and humanities or artistically inclined students in Adams--who do not mingle and will not unless they are forced to.

But these sharply focused breakdowns of the house system do not warrant total randomization. Though significant, findings released by the College of other disparities do not either.

Those findings largely present only exaggerations of regular statistical variations among houses--variations that will continue even after randomization.

The staff opinion flippantly dismisses non-ordered choice as a misbegotten "compromise" proposal that in real terms may do little or nothing to correct the real problem.

The best solution keeps in mind and balances the realities and values at Harvard.

Consider one such reality. Whether on the basis of academic advice, physical attractions such as swimming pools or presses, proximity to extra-curricular activity, there remain important, legitimate reasons for students to wish to select or not select a house, regardless of stereotype.

The College should reconsider partial randomization as a fair, moderate, balanced means of restoring diversity to Harvard, without capitulating to nonsensical compromise or extreme reaction. It also gives community members the responsibility for deciding their own fates.

At its best moment, the staff concludes, "Segregation, voluntary or involuntary, accentuates differences and breeds intolerance." This is vitally, damnably true. But exaggeration or misinterpretation of the degree of this segregation risks a blind, reflexive response. The place for correcting very human, very social failings, lies within students themselves. Holding otherwise risks the accusation of paternalism, cynicism and shortsightedness.