Smaller Blocking Groups Encourage Stress, Strain Friendships

The last first-year students handed in their blocking group forms in the basement of the Science Center yesterday in an annual tradition that often marks the end of weeks or months of anxiety and uncertainty.

But this year, when first-years began thinking about who they would block with, one thing was certain: far fewer choices would be available to them than had been to past students, and the spots in their blocking groups would be far more precious.

Previously, first-year students were allowed a maximum of 16 students in their blocking groups, but this year there were no more than eight names on the blue forms that students submitted to indicate their decisions.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says that for the vast majority of first-years, fashioning a blocking group of eight or fewer students was probably little more difficult than putting together a group of 16.

He is confident, he says, that eight is enough, and that the majority of students will be able to piece together cohesive, albeit smaller, groups of friends.

"When people say 'Oh, I have all these friends and it's really important that we be together,' there is some skepticism as to whether that is the case," he says.

But in interviews with The Crimson, many students expressed frustration about the blocking process and the new size restrictions in particular. The switch from 16 to eight, they say, comes at a price.

John, a first-year, says his blocking situation would have been fine if his group had had just one more slot.

"I don't know why they have to have eight. Why can't they have 10 or 12?" says John. (All first-years' names have been changed at their request.)

David agrees. He wanted to block with four of his roommates. There was also the guy next door--his best friend--and the friend from his FOP trip, and three other students who were friends of him and his roommates.

All told, there were nine of them, and they reluctantly sat down to resolve the situation only days before the blocking forms were due.

"We had a really tough night. We had a hard time. We decided to go 8 of us in a blocking group and one person was left out," he says.

David says that, after a long debate, two of the remaining eight felt so bad about leaving one of the students out that they decided to leave the blocking group and join the student who had been left out, splitting his group of friends down the middle.

A Whole New Ball Game

The eight-person cap on blocking groups is a new phenomenon, and the college will not compile data on the makeup of the groups for some time to come.

But again and again, students hypothesized that the smaller size was forcing students into blocking groups that represented only one sliver of their Harvard lives.

Doug, an Asian-American, was forced to choose between a blocking group that included his roommates and one that was entirely Asian-American.

With such small group sizes, he was unable to combine the two groups of friends.

"What the eight-person group does, in essence, is make you cook everything down, and make everything very specific," he says. "You can't have the diversity in the group that you might have had before."

And students say the eight-person limit does not easily accommodate blocking groups with both men and women.

"Girls who can only block with seven other people will block with seven other girls," says Jennifer. "They need roommates."

She adds that many blocking groups she knows of are single-sex. "If there were more people, they might like to [mix things up], but there's not enough room."

But Lewis says the change was intended to promote diversity by preventing a few large, homogenous blocking groups from affecting the overall composition of a House.

And Michael D. Shumsky '00, who transferred to Harvard after his first year at Wesleyan, says his time at Wesleyan taught him that free choice does not necessarily lead to diversity.

"I hoped to immerse myself in a social and educational atmosphere with a whole range of backgrounds and perspectives that I had never been exposed to," says Shumsky, who served on the Committee on House Life when it voted to decrease blocking group size.

Shumsky says Wesleyan's system of choice led to housing arrangements balkanized along cultural or interest group lines.

Formative Virtue

Lewis says that the benefits of the smaller blocking group size might not be immediately apparent to the students who are caught up in the frantic process of deciding who will be included in their group.

Nearly two weeks ago, Lewis rejected a petition signed by over half of the first-year class calling for him to expand the group maximum back to 16.

"This whole system is designed for a larger educational good over a longer period of time," he says.

The smaller size, he says, is meant in part to prevent students from living with large numbers of like-minded people who would insulate them from the House community as a whole.

"Harvard goes to extraordinary lengths to find the most talented, ambitious, and interesting future leaders of the world," he says. "If you live with all of your friends from Andover or from the football team, you're losing something."

But some students say decisions about living arrangements are personal considerations, and should lie beyond the reach of administrators trying to create communities that serve a larger educational purpose.

"I think it's a student's prerogative. If they want to hang out with these people, they should be able to do so," says Joyce. "In theory, I'd want people to have to reach out to the House more, but I don't think it's the University's place to force them in this way."

But as Lewis points out, the idea that the College's residential experience should be tailored with educational goals in mind was a fixture in the traditional theory behind the liberal arts education.

In a 1928 report, President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, argued that students should not have full control over their housing, because they would naturally congregate towards students with similar backgrounds and interests.

"Large communities tend towards cliques based on similarity of origin and upon wealth," Lowell wrote. "Great masses of unorganized young men...are prone to superficial currents of thought and interest, to the detriment of the personal intellectual process that ought to dominate mature men seeking higher education."