The Quadling's Manifesto

Plenty of things about Harvard are unfair. Some students are admitted for reasons other than their talents; some have better first-year roommates and advisers than others; some, taking the same course are assigned teaching fellows that are far worse than others.

Sure, these things all irk me a bit—after all, a necessary evil is still, well, an evil. But I don’t let them bother me too much. After all, graduate students need to teach, and it’s simply not reasonable to expect all of them to have equal pedagogical skills. Harvard needs money, and thus must on occasion bite the bullet and accept sub-par students whose names coincide with those on its buildings. Some things just are the way they are. C’est la vie. Que sera, sera.

But catch me on a bad day and mention Harvard’s housing system to me, and I’m apt to fly into a rage—or at least to write a shrill newspaper column about it.

What bothers me about the way Harvard allocates its residential space?

Well, it isn’t that there are vast disparities in the size and quality of rooms. Nor is it the disparities in location. Nor that all undergraduates pay the same rooming fee to occupy rooms that would likely command differences of over 100 percent if priced on the open market.

No, it isn’t any of these things—irritating as they are. What really gets me is that, unlike most of Harvard’s other inequities, the housing arrangement is almost entirely devoid of a legitimate and rational justification.

To be sure, there is little that can be done to fix the fact that some of Harvard’s residential Houses are better than others. But it takes very little imagination to come up with several more equitable ways for Harvard to mitigate the intrinsic unfairness in distributing its housing.

To take just one example, all the students assigned to one House—oh, say, Currier—in their sophomore year could be assigned to another House—oh, say, Kirkland—for their junior year, and a third House for their senior year. The process could still be random and still be determined in the spring of one’s first year, the only difference being that each group would receive three housing assignments—one for each year—rather than one.

The first—and the most vacuous—complaint likely to be raised against such a proposal, or any like it, is that “House spirit” would be depleted by having people switch every year, thus taking some of the punch out of activities like intramural sports and generally lowering the morale in the Houses.

In responding to this claim, I’ll first note that House spirit, to whatever extent it still exists, is by now a piddling remnant of what it (supposedly) was during the halcyon days of pre-randomization, when Houses had a certain character cultivated by their masters.

But even if House spirit remains a viable and valuable commodity—by no means a foregone conclusion—its promotion is nowhere near as important as treating people fairly. Moreover, I don’t think anyone would have trouble becoming attached to their new House each year; after all, first-years have no problem becoming quickly attached to their new dorms and exhibiting a great deal of dorm spirit within weeks, if not days, of arriving on campus.

On a somewhat related note, one might also argue that moving people around every year would impair their ability to form relationships with House masters, tutors and the like. While not wholly lacking in validity, this claim, like the one regarding House spirit, does not even approach a fair justification for giving whole swathes of the student population such short shrift. And one could quite readily make the case that the opportunity to meet three times as many tutors—by switching Houses each year—handily offsets whatever might be lost by shifting us around in an equitable manner.

Others may try to refute me by citing the results of senior surveys, in which graduates from the Quad Houses report a higher degree of satisfaction with their residential experience than their counterparts in the River Houses. But these data are hard to take seriously. A person’s happiness is always relative to his expectations, and because many quadlings enter their houses expecting a Siberian gulag, it isn’t surprising that many graduate feeling highly “satisfied.”

But suppose for a second that the data from the surveys is, in fact, valid. Is it not, then, quite unfair to the poor, beleaguered residents of Kirkland, Lowell and Eliot Houses that they do not get to spend some of their time in the hallowed halls of Currier, Pforzheimer and Cabot which produce such satisfaction?

Unfortunately, I’m quite skeptical that Harvard will act any time soon to create a more equitable system—because for that to happen, significant pressure from a large portion of the student body would likely be required. But since only about a fifth of the students on campus at any given time—those upperclass students in the Quad, Mather and, on its bad days, perhaps Quincy—are being given the short end of the stick, such widespread pressure is not likely to materialize.

So if there is anything to be concluded, it is this: The quadlings have nothing to lose but their sub-par housing situation. They have a world to win. Quadlings of all Houses, unite!

Zachary S. Podolsky ’04 is a classics concentrator in Currier House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.