Lottery

the Editors of the Crimson:

I'm trying to ignore for the moment that the decision about implementing a partial random lottery housing system disregarded student opinion. I'll pretend that, without considering the merits of university decisions, students should have no voice in making the policies that affect only them. With the random lottery system, there are already enough problems without raising this objection.

Harvard is trying to reconcile the qualities of choice and diversity within one housing system. Until now, Harvard (and many other schools) assigned students according to choice. Other schools (such as Yale) assign students entirely at random, preferring diversity to choice. Each system has its merits, for if it didn't, schools would not be using these methods to house students, and each system has succeeded in maintaining choice or diversity.

Harvard wants both, and now has decided to sacrificesome of the choice of the students for the diversity of the University. But the effect on the houses will be surprisingly small. If 25 percent of students are randomly assigned to eight of the houses, then 37.5 percent of the Class of 1992 will have been assigned to those houses randomly. This accounts for 12.5 percent of the population of the entire house, hardly enough to inspire diversity and liberate the Harvard and outside communities from their stereotypes of the houses. If the lottery is run such that 25 percent of entering students in each participating house will have been randomly assigned, then only 8.3 percent of each house will be made up of these diversity-wielding Sophomores. This would offer more students choice in the lottery system, but the benefits of diversity would be reduced.

The sacrifice of a few randomly assigned students intended to bring diversity is a new form of tokenism. The randomly assigned students do not benefit from losing their choice and being placed in an environment in which they may be less comfortable, and the upperclassmen will not suddenly transcend their perceptions of house and self because of an influx of 40 token, unexpected sophomores. These students are being used to pacify the University's embarrassment over house stereotypes, which block Harvard's dream of perfect diversity.

But to assume diversity is the motivation for the new system results in contradiction. Eliot, Adams, and Winthrop have refused to participate in the random lottery. Eliot and Adams suffer from the strongest stereotypes, and if the University wanted to ensure diversity in the house system, all of the houses must be required to participate. So the relatively diverse houses become more diverse, and the less diverse houses remain as they are. That some houses will not participate indicates that it is not just an issue of choice against diversity, for Harvard wants to preserve house sovereignty and encourage house diversity at the expense of student choice. And somehow this new system soothes Harvard's conscience. Jed David Kolko '92