It’s the Funding, Stupid

Already this semester, copious amounts of ink have been spilled on this page on the subject of House life at Harvard College. While many claim to have the answer to the seemingly age-old question of how best to create viable, inclusive social communities at Harvard, for the most part, the solutions that have been proposed constitute little more than treating the symptoms of House life’s deficiencies.

Take dining hall restrictions, for example. The argument here goes something like this: restrict access to House dining halls to residents, and you create an incubator for House community and fraternization. But proponents of dining hall restrictions, more often than not, fail to engage the real issue that underlies the purported need for the restrictions themselves: the lack of any real desire, on the part of most undergraduates, to go “home” for their supper. Closing House dining halls to non-residents will hardly make people suddenly feel attached to their Houses. After all, if House communities were strong enough to breed real attachment, most students would presumably avoid “dining out” in the first place.

Then there’s the oft-made suggestion of Yale-style housing assignments. Lottery incoming freshmen into a House before their arrival at Harvard, and they will grow attached to their soon-to-be residential communities during their first year. But even Yale-style housing constitutes a woefully incomplete recipe for real House community; for a given freshman to develop an affinity for his House—grounded in anything other than propinquity-by-necessity—House life must be rich enough to win his affections away from the myriad student organizations that claw at undergraduates’ time and loyalties.

Most recently, the debate has turned to House Committee (HoCo) funding. Late last month, the Undergraduate Council (UC) announced changes to the way in which it will fund HoCos. But while the new rules are certainly a step in the right direction, they cannot hope to go far enough to make HoCos genuinely effective instruments of House community. To do that, the UC would have to take a drastic step: stop funding HoCos altogether.

Under the present funding scheme, the UC allocates $3,500 to every HoCo each semester. Given the role that Houses could—and were designed to—play in campus life at Harvard, this is barely a pittance. Since the UC has other things on which it needs to regularly spend its budget (failed campus events, for example), the most logical way to improve HoCo funding is to dispense funds from the College, directly.

With the appointment this year of a new Dean for Residential Life and in light of the administration’s ongoing efforts at improving social life on this campus, it hardly seems unreasonable to expect the College to provide increased funding directly to the organizations that are best positioned to create the kinds of House communities to which undergraduates might feel genuinely attached.

But more money alone isn’t enough.

Even if HoCos are funded directly by the College, and even if their budgets are consequently increased, major differences among Houses will prevent a great many students from feeling genuinely content in their communities. I’m referring not to architecture or location, but rather to House trusts—anachronistic holdovers from a time when admission to Houses was by application and, as a result, Houses were divided along socio-economic lines.

As one might expect, Houses pre-randomization boasted much stronger individual identities and communities. And while it was the political non-sustainability of these identities that brought about the randomization of housing assignments in 1995, they produced, in their time, strong loyalties among their alumni for the 65 years of their existence. And, as is often the case in higher education, where there’s alumni loyalty, there’s alumni giving.

It’s because of a trust that the organizers of Eliot House’s annual spring Fête can afford to splurge on champagne fountains and ice sculptures. We Winthropians, meanwhile, content ourselves with 40s in Gore Courtyard during our own spring formal. (Not to say that there’s anything wrong with our distinctly more down-to-earth brand of revelry, but ice sculptures would be pretty cool.)

It is unreasonable to expect equal development of House communities so long as there is such a great divergence in the extravagance of the events that each House is able to put on for its members. The College ought to take on the responsibility of ensuring that each HoCo is able to provide a menu of community events on par with each of its peers.

But how can we hope to equalize the resources available to each HoCo? The answer, comrades, is simple: Communism of the Houses.

Wherever possible, the College should replace individual Houses as the beneficiary of House trusts. The income from these trusts should then be distributed equally among HoCos as part of their annual funding package. In those cases where trusts cannot be alienated in this way, the College should either deduct the amount of the trust’s annual payout from the House’s annual funding or require the House to remit the trust’s payout to a central fund, for subsequent equal distribution among Houses.

The Harvard campus has been cleverly divided into relatively small, manageable, contiguous communities since the 1930s. To fail to take advantage of this arrangement—even as most of the required infrastructure is already in place—is to cheat undergraduates of the quality of residential life we ought to be able to expect. By making House funding uniform and directing it centrally, the College can take its first tentative steps towards putting its House communities back into proper use.

After 75 years, it’s about time.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.