Housing Lottery Hurts Students

How is it possible that one of the most respected universities in America treats its students so poorly? I am speaking specifically about Harvard's housing system, in which students are treated as random objects of varying shapes, sizes and colors which must be evenly distributed among houses. Students are numbers to be arranged at the whim of the great socialized, politically correct arbiter: the Housing Lottery.

One might think that the objectification of students ends once they enter the homelike environment of the house that has been selected for them. Not so. For those students who have been relegated to a house and an environment which they despise, the objectification continues--in the form of the transferring process.

I present myself as one of many examples of the housing nightmare. As a first-year student, I was assigned to Currier House, This was not one of my four selected choices. In fact, had I been asked, it probably would have been my last. I was surprised when I met others who had coveted Currier House as their first choice, but who had been mysteriously placed in a river house. Could we perhaps trade places? Certainly not. Such an action would have violated the ingenious system of the Housing Lottery.

Thus, being a good, conditioned student of Harvard University, I accepted my misfortune and adopted a passive attitude. I would live in Currier for a year and see if I would learn to like it. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad and I would come to appreciate Currier as "my house." If things didn't work out, I was told, I could always transfer to a different house at the end of the year. This seemed like a fair proposal.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn to like Currier House. I came to loathe the house even more than its horrific location. My roommates and I were miserable in our environment. We had given it our best shot, but we knew that in order to maintain our sanity, we had to get out. Each of us had come to identify with other houses over the year, so we agreed to go our own ways. We would transfer in small groups of one and two.

Little did we realize that transferring is not a so simple, and far from guaranteed. What we thought would be adequate compensation for a year of depressing misery, turned out to be another Harvard housing hell. Once again, we became numbers in the bureaucratic science of applications and double talk. I could have written a novel about my horrible year, but the housing office would not have cared.

I could have threatened suicide, but then I would have just been one less number to deal with. In transferring, as with housing, everything was to be random, because random was supposed to be fair.

As it turned out, some friends, were "lucky," while others will be left alone in the Quad next year (victims of chance). One friends will take a term off and try to transfer to another university. Why stay at a school that has no respect for you as a person and treats you like an object? Why stay with only the random hope of getting lucky next time?

The ludicrous nature of the housing system is even more pronounced in my situation. I was not allowed to transfer, despite the fact that I will not be at Harvard next year. I had wanted to shift my house affiliation so that I could return during my senior year to a house which I liked.

I could not possibly have posed a problem as far as rooming space is concerned, because I would not have needed a room. In my case I was not asking to transfer physically, but figuratively. Due to randomization, however, I was not an individual case, but a number--an unlucky number.

One question has pervaded all our housing horrors: "How is this possible? How can it be that our parents are scraping up money at home in order for us to live miserably here? Why does such a highly respected, progressive university have such a backward housing system? I find it absolutely shocking that after one year of "giving it a try," I am not allowed to transfer houses.

I am not treated as a person who has had an unhappy year due to Harvard housing, but as a number in a new lottery. Harvard shifts the blame from its own pathetic housing system to the student who is the victim of the lottery system's random mistakes. How is this possible? Tripler Pell '96