Numbers Game

In a largely symbolic gesture, Dean Fox announced last week a new phase in the College's young tradition of coed housing--the end of predetermined sex ratios for the undergraduate houses.

When Harvard first decided to allow men and women to live in the same dorms in 1969, administrators kept the sex ratios at the Radcliffe Quad low--1.5 men for every woman--both to maintain tradition and to create a "warm, supportive atmosphere for women students who wanted that," Thomas Dingman '67, associate dean of the College, said last week.

"That kind of boomeranged on us," Fox said when he announced his decision to abolish the 1.5-to-1 ratio at the Quad and maintain only the 2.5-to-1 maximum ratio on all Houses. "What we had started to help women was ending up discriminating against them," Fox said.

The discrimination came when administrators, struggling to find enough women to meet the lower Quad ratios, sent a higher percentage of women to the Quad. Danguole Spakevicius '81, who filed a motion earlier this year with the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) asking for an end to the ratios, called the issue "more a matter of principle than anything else." She added she believes the abolition of the sex ratio will not alter the number of students who will choose to live at the Quad.

Quad House officials are hoping Spakevicius is right. With more women enrolling every year, the ratios had become increasingly insignificant. Officials said yesterday they fear students will take the decision to mean that the administration does not care about the Quad.

"There is the argument that publicity has more effect than facts," J. Woodland Hastings, master of North House, said last week, adding "we'll just have to wait and see what it does to the numbers."