Moving Beyond Barons to a Computer Age

The uproar this spring among freshmen opposed to a change in house assignment would have surprised generations of earlier men and women at Harvard. Far from adapting to the latest change suggested by administrators, students acted as if the lottery system was an untouchable Harvard tradition, as sacred as eating ice cream every day.

But history suggests few things could be further from the truth.

Freshman house selection has been transformed so drastically in its 60 years of existence that today's system seems to be a polar opposite of the first selection process of the 1930s.

Founding father of the house system President A.L. Lowell made it clear in 1930 that houses selected students, not vice-versa. "The crucial point is the selection of the students for each House," he said in a speech introducing the new system.

Students who applied for spaces in the system had to complete detailed application forms for each house in which they were interested. Decisions about who could live in each house were left solely to masters.

Competition was intense to enter the deluxe new rooms in the first two houses--Lowell and Dunster--as 700 juniors vied for 160 spaces in September, 1930.

Factors such as high school background, scholastic rank, financial resources, concentration, athletics and social club membership all played a role in applying. Students also had to state the amount they would pay for a room, which, in that day, cost between $110 and $500 per student.

Yet even then the administration hailed diversity's importance. "Each house is intended to comprise as nearly as may be a cross-section of the whole residential membership of the College," said Lowell.

Independent Barons

The system of masters' choice continued for 30 years, through the late 1950s, by which time the house system had become a Harvard institution. The masters' role, both in selecting residents and directing academic, social and athletic activities, made them a focal point in each house.

Assistant Dean of Freshmen W.C. Burriss Young '55 recalls the application process for the houses as "sort of like applying to college." Some of the more serious masters would go so far as to pull students' admissions folders from the Freshmen Dean's Office, Young says.

In Class, a 1985 novel romanticizing Harvard in the 50s-by Erich Segal '58, masters wheeled and dealed their way to secure the 'best' students.

In one part of the novel, Eliot House Master John Finley '25 explains to underclassman Danny Rossi, a musical genius, why he had been assigned to Eliot, which Rossi considers full of "smug preppies." Finley says, "I wanted you very badly, Daniel. I had to trade the master of Adams two football stalwarts and a published poet just to get him to relinquish you."

Finley escorts Rossi to his room, which is complete with a broad vista of the Charles River and a grand piano--a special conducement for Rossi.

Young says masters from the 1950s set the tone for their houses. Young in particular noted Finley and Master Eliot Perkins of Lowell as "the classic masters of Harvard legend." The pair even battled one another from their courtyard domains in a long-standing rivlarly.

"They were independent barons," said Young. "I think some of the stereotypes in the freshman mythology date back to the days of masters' choice."

But master's choice eventually faded out as the arbiter for housing assignments.

By the late 1950s, Dean of the College L. Watson created a review committee to "add diversity" to the houses by taking 30 percent of house assignment away from the masters.

"Although it's a great deal of work, it is far preferable to the IBM method used at Yale," said Watson in a 1959 reference to the New Haven university's policy of random housing.

Student choice was on the rise, however. In 1959, 66 percent of freshmen gained entrance to their top choice. In 1965, the last year of this process, 70 percent received their first choice.

Social Engineering

But the turmoil of the 1960s youth movement soon swept over Harvard. Searching after a "fairer" ideal, a 1966 House Assignment Committee revolutionized student life after the years of masters' dominance.

Through careful planning--reminiscent of social engineering--the new process aimed to please students while organizing houses into a thorough mix of the student body.

Qualities such as student personality and secondary school background weighed heavily in the system. Students whose characters ranged from "outstanding" to "innocuous" to "possible problem" were blended into the houses. Meanwhile, each of four categories of high schools--"traditional preparatory," Exeter and Andover, "other" private schools and public high schools--had to be represented in each house.

"Our first aim is to please the students, but we have to stay within certain limits," Watson said in 1968.

The limits were breached more drastically than Watson imagined they would be. In 1972, coeducation came to Harvard, adding a degree of complication to housing that led to computerized selection.

A 1973 computer system, programmed to diversify the Houses by evenly distributing students according to field of concentration, rank group, high school background and master's preference, resulted in fewer than half of all freshmen receiving their first choice. Fifteen percent were denied all their top five choices.

Outraged students petitioned and protested. A lottery was proposed, but the new Dean of the College Charles P. Whitlock said such a process "doesn't fit into the Harvard way of doing things."

Protest changed Whitlock's mind in 1974. The Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life created a partial lottery system, from which the current housing lottery process has evolved.

Under the 1974 plan, students ranked their preference of the 12 houses. Houses were lotteried only if more students listed them as first choices than rooms were available.

The partial lottery pleased so many that in 1976 it was expanded into a full lottery based completely on numerical preference. Students ranked their choices, and the lottery went through each group's choices completely before passing to the next number.

"There are no circumstances under which listing things out of order will help you," said Bruce Collier, who had become the assistant dean of the College for housing.

The system was not as well received by students, primarily because it did not maximize first choice. Eleven percent of freshmen received one of their last three choices.

The very next year, the College revised the computer program to maximize first choice, adapting a system that has survived to the present day.

Only a campus-wide referendum in 1985 showing that 75 percent of students prefer knowing their lottery numbers before submitting house choice has led to a change in policy since that time.

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 released the lottery numbers to students a few days prior to the application deadline in 1986, but authorized its removal again this year.

"Students didn't think then," says Young, summarizing the world of difference between earlier days at Harvard and today. "You did as you were told" then, says the dean. Even when a process "was probably unfair, there was an acceptance of things that wouldn't be accepted today."