‘A Guinea Pig’: Looking Back on Randomized Housing for the Class of 1999
For more than two decades, Harvard students were able to rank where they wanted to live for three years of college. But in 1995, Harvard’s administration decided it was time for a change.
In a decision that would be met with fierce blowback, Dean of Harvard College L. Fred Jewett ’57 announced that effective with the Class of 1999, rising sophomores in blocking groups of up to 16 would be randomly assigned to one of Harvard’s 12 upperclassmen Houses — “without any pre-determined order or pattern.”
Jennifer H. Wu ’99, who served on the House Committee for Pforzheimer House, said that her class was “kind of a guinea pig for the randomization.”
“When we were told as freshmen, I don’t think that we knew what it meant, and nor did anyone else, because it never happened before,” she said.
At the time, there was an uproar to the College’s decision. An Undergraduate Council poll at the time revealed that 82 percent of the student body opposed randomized housing, and shortly after the decision, more than 200 students and faculty members rallied outside of University Hall to protest the change, in what The Crimson called “the largest student-led protest in recent Harvard memory.”
But soon enough, students grew accustomed to the change — and the House system remains randomized to this day, though in 1999 the maximum size of a blocking group was shrunk to eight with the Class of 2003. 25 years later, students and faculty who lived through randomization look back at the process that radically changed what it’s like to live at Harvard.
‘Something Should Be Done’
The first Houses were first built in 1930, and were meant — according to then-Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877 — to be “be as nearly as possible a cross-section of the College.” In 1971, after decades of House faculty deans — then called masters — deciding who got to live in the House, students were allowed to start ranking their options. The system inadvertently produced stereotypes surrounding each of the Houses: Adams, for instance, was known to house artsy kids, the Quad was predominantly a space for Black students, and Eliot was preppy.
“I had a lot of Black friends, and they were often in block groups and they wanted to be in the quad. They wanted to be kind of in that self-selected atmosphere, and that was something that was desirable,” said Rudd W. Coffey ’97.
The Houses’ reputations meant students would self-sort when it came time to rank, perpetuating the character each House was known for.
“Every House at that point — it had a unique kind of quality,” Wu said. “As freshmen, you automatically had ideas as to what the Houses’ character was because it wasn’t random. So there was a lot of pre-meds in certain houses and there was a lot of athletes in river Houses because it’s closer to the fields.”
But for some who were House masters at the time, the arguments against randomization — the loss of treasured House traditions, or spaces for minority students — were not as strong.
“Those did become places where African American students would feel comfortable, because it was with a lot of other students. I know the reasons that that was good, but I think given the rapidly changing demographics of Harvard, that was just not sustainable,” said Diana L. Eck, who was the Lowell House Master in 1999. “And that’s true for all stereotypes.”
John E. Dowling ’57, who retired as master of Leverett House in 1998, said that despite people’s fears, treasured House traditions persisted after randomization.
“The arguments against randomization was all the traditions will be lost in the various houses — which over the years have grown to be important part of house life. That isn’t true,” Dowling said. “I think it’s worked very well,” he added.
Dowling said that in his view, a diverse House was crucial to the success of the House system.
“The point of the House system is that you learn as much from your fellow students, as you do from the faculty, and from what else goes on at Harvard. And therefore having people with different views, different expertise and foreign talents that you can learn from in a House, is what makes the House system very special,” he said.
Not all House Masters were in support of the change, though. Adams House Master Robert J. Kiely fiercely opposed the College’s new policy, even addressing the crowd at the anti-randomization rally in the fall of 1995.
“The least diverse of our houses are more than 100 times as diverse as University Hall. Diversity is a relative matter,” Kiely said at the time. “So you wonder, who are they to tell you to be diverse?”
Still, the self-segregation did at times create issues — like when concerns arose that Kirkland House would be in violation of NCAA policies prohibiting athletic dorms, since “so many athletes now who had selected and were in Kirkland House,” according to Dowling.
The stereotypes were so entrenched, Dowling said, that a student poll found that most students would not be comfortable living in a majority of the upperclassmen houses — a trend Dowling said was crucial in shaping his views in support of randomization.
“We couldn’t have almost little clubs in terms of individual houses,” he said. “So, that was really the thing that pushed me over the side saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something about this.’ Some of the masters felt something should be done. I was one of them. Then, Dean Jewett felt that something should be done.”
‘It Came Out of Nowhere’
The administration viewed the homogeneity of the Houses as a serious problem, prompting a 1994 report by the Committee on the Structure of Harvard College that found that “pronounced variations in the populations of the various Houses” could result in students being “educationally deprived.”
To fix that, the committee — chaired by Jewett’s eventual successor and computer science professor Harry R. Lewis ’68, recommended that the preference-based system “be abandoned in favor of random assignment of roommate groups at the end of Freshman year,” but that there be “controls on gender ratios enforced as at present.”
Some, though, said that the decision was made with little transparency.
“It came out of nowhere,” said Coffey, who served on faculty committees and was a “very senior member” of the Undergraduate Council, Harvard’s former student government.“No one was expecting it. It hadn’t been something discussed.”
“This was this thing that hadn’t been discussed, debated, gone through what I would consider the appropriate channels of ‘Hey, let’s all talk about this and decide if there are good reasons to change the system,’” Coffey added.
The decision, Coffey said, “took the students by shock.”
Despite the recommendation to control for gender, Wu, who was one of three women in her blocking group of 16, said that in her year, there were multiple all-male blocking groups that were sorted into Pforzheimer House, making the House approximately “80 percent men or more,” though she added she remembers her time there fondly.
“It was probably like real life in Corporate America,” she said.“I had never experienced that kind of gender imbalance in my living circumstances in my entire life.”
Sarah J. Cooper ’97, a former Crimson Editorial Chair and Currier resident who was in the minority of students not in a house she ranked, said the decision to randomize housing mattered to undergraduates because it meant their experience wouldn’t necessarily be “what they thought it would be”
“When you have something in place that gives people more control over their future — their future three years at a college or at Harvard — that feels like it is being taken away, I think people worry about whether their college experience will be the same as they envisioned it,” she said.
“I think a lot of people had an image of themselves, walking through the square or walking toward the river, going into their dorm, their house, and so for some people, that wouldn’t happen,” Cooper added.
But for others, the abrupt change triggered a wave of discontentment.
Though the College’s goal was to increase the diversity in the Houses through randomization, many at the time argued over the definition of “diversity” and some argued that the College’s move was misguided and robbed minority students of spaces they could be comfortable in.
E. Michelle Drake ’97, the then-president of the Civil Liberties Union of Harvard, told The Crimson in 1995 that she didn’t “like the University’s moving them into the community so people can get exposed to them and see what it’s like to live next door to a Black person.”
Irene C. Cheng ’97, the then-president of the Asian-American Students Association, told The Crimson at the time that for students of color who “feel uncomfortable in the presence of these old-boy networks, final clubs, things like that,” a solution “is to form communities of people who are supportive.”
Even Kiely — the Adams House master who opposed randomization — said then that “enforced diversity looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work best in social terms.”
Looking back, Wu said that when randomization was instituted it seemed like “Harvard was focused on facial diversity, rather than substantive diversity.”
“My belief, now looking back, is that one of the reasons that people perceived a lack of diversity is they saw a lack of racial diversity. So for example, Quincy house was known for having all the Asians and being pre-med,” she said.
Randomization, Wu said, “focused on what it looked like, and not what it was.”
‘Better Off’
Still, for many, randomization seemed like the right choice — a sentiment validated by the persistence of the system.
Lewis, the former College Dean whose committee recommended randomization, said he believed the original concerns surrounding the shift to randomization — namely, that students from minority groups would lose their affinity spaces — were “overblown” because “none of the disasters that were predicted seem to have occurred.”
“I don’t want to belittle the problems that are confronted by minority student groups, be they any of the ones that I’ve discussed — the Black students or the gay students, for example, who do have a different Harvard experience,” he said. “But I’m not persuaded that they have wound up worse off because they are no longer as socially, as residentially segregated as they once were.”
“I think that they — as well as Harvard as a whole — are better off that the housing system is integrated now,” Lewis added.
Today, many argue that randomization has been beneficial for the House system.
Cooper, the former Crimson editorial chair, said she ultimately thought randomization was “a much better way to run things” because the rank-based system didn’t guarantee students would receive their preferred housing placement, and “there were always people who didn’t get any of their choices.”
Despite her disappointment at being randomly assigned to live in Currier, Cooper noted that she met her husband in Currier, and that she has “memories there, memories of my roommates and my friends and people I met.”
“I think that’s really what makes your house your home for three years,” she added.
Wu said that generally, “randomization makes sense” because it opened up opportunities for upperclassmen to forge friendships based on proximity, rather than past interactions.
“It takes people out of what they’re used to,” she said. “Randomization causes you or allows you or forces you to hang out with people who maybe you didn’t know freshman year, and it turns out that many of those friends that you meet as sophomores, juniors, and seniors turn out to be your best friends.”
Eck noted that despite initial protest over the switch to randomized housing, the student consensus on the decision soon changed to acceptance.
“The pushback against randomization may have gone on for a little bit, maybe a year or something as people got used to it. But you know, frankly, we didn’t ever hear anything about it after that,” Eck said, adding that House traditions — like Adams House’s drag nights and queer-friendly culture — persisted.
“But it wasn’t as if you were not going to feel great if you were gay or lesbian or trans and ended up in Currier,” she added.
For Eck, the former Lowell House master, houses should strive to be welcoming environments for all types of students rather than a magnet for just a select few — something randomization was able to accomplish.
“All of the Houses should be places that feel welcoming, and a home for Black students, gay students, first-gen students,” she said.
“Frankly, I didn’t think twice about randomization being a good idea. I just assumed it was and it was exactly that kind of community that I wanted to be involved with, because it was so very diverse,” she added.
—Staff writer Joyce E. Kim can be reached at joyce.kim@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @joycekim324.
—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.