Houses Divided

"Freedom is not the chief and continual object of their desires, it is equality for which [Americans] feel an eternal love, they rush on freedom with quick and sudden impulses, but if they miss their mark, they resign themselves to their disappointment; but nothing will satisfy them without equality, and they would rather die than lose it." Tocqueville, Democracy in America

"You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much."   20th century proverb

STUDENTS AT THIS UNIVERSITY have always been the exception to Tocqueville's rule, inevitably finding it difficult to accept regulations imposed in the name of equality. A current of individualism runs deep at Harvard, and it is not surprising that students here enjoy a level of personal and academic freedom matched by undergraduates at few institutions. When Harvard has tried to impose tougher, more uniform academic regulations, its efforts have often been derailed; administrators now freely acknowledge that the Core Curriculum, once heralded as a return to academic basics, will leave students at least as much discretion as they enjoyed under Gen Ed. Americans may treasure equality of treatment at the hands of their government, as Tocqueville suggested. But at Harvard, it is liberty--from academic regulations and administrative rules--that students prize.

Nowhere is that liberty better realized than in the University's housing policy, which permits students more control over their on-campus housing than at probably any other college. Every March, some 75 percent of freshmen win admission to the House of their choice; another 5 percent end up in their second or third choices. Undergraduate pressure secured that privilege only a decade ago, when the new student-faculty Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life discarded a 35-year-old system of quotas and "masters' choices."

Since then, the "right" to choose housing has become an icon of student life. The handful of students denied their first choices each year inevitably feel denied some privilege. That attitude, moreover, now pervades administrators, who each year feel compelled to disclose new figures that show the lottery accommodating student caprices better than ever. Ask any administrator why the College has stuck by what many acknowledge to be a troublesome free-choice policy, and he will immediately criticize alternatives such as Yale's method of pre-assignment.

But another factor--trepidation--underlies the College's reluctance to tamper with the "right" to a preferential lottery. To varying degrees, most officials agree that, in the words of one top administrator, "there are people who are missing some kinds of experiences because they don't have equal access to people of different kinds"--thanks to the impetus to clique-forming provided by a lottery based on choice. Yet because of administration perceptions that students would fight a more stringent system every step of the way, "everyone would prefer students to have freedom of choice."

That freedom undoubtedly keeps students happy--at least, the 80 percent for whom the lottery works. It forecloses, however, a potent option for the college to improve undergraduate life. Most administrators concur that any system that makes two Houses 3 percent Black and another 17 percent Black, a system that allows one House to have 45 percent varsity athletes while another has 4.7 percent is a far cry from the ideal House that would be a microcosm of the College. Reliance on the preferential lottery also builds up and reinforces House stereotypes, adds to the frustration of those sent to undesired Houses, and makes real contact between disparate groups decidedly less likely. All in the name of preserving "student rights."

IT NEED NOT be that way. Harvard could learn much from the experiences of its two Ivy League rivals with comparable systems, Yale and Princeton. Those experiences prove not only the merits of more random techniques of apportioning students, but also that, politically, administrators can tamper with preferential housing and live to tell about it.

New changes at Princeton, long considered a bastion of racial separatism, show that lesson well. Administrators there recently decided to use undergraduate housing to spread students more evenly across campus, a step they took because "you'd find the football players all lived in the same place," according to Housing Director Tom Miller. More troubling, at least one dorm was disproportionately Black--Princeton Inn, with nearly 20 percent Blacks--while others were nearly all white. Administrators hope the pre-assignment system the college has settled on for freshmen and sophomores--similar to Yale's system, except for the limits Princeton has put on the proportions of members of given groups allowed in a dorm--will allow for "a reasonable balance."

Significantly, Princeton students haven't voiced any objections to the assigned housing, though it replaces a preferential system fairly akin to Harvard's. The reason: Princeton, tactically wise, opted to phase in pre-assignment so as not to affect any undergraduates present when the decision was made. Even Blacks at Princeton Inn, whom Miller says have used the dorm as a support system, haven't protested. Tomorrow's college students, as Princeton realized, enjoy no virtual representation; Harvard administrators eager to use their lottery to break down racial and other disparities would do well to follow that strategic lesson.

Yale's experience with pre-assignment is also revealing. Associate Dean David Henson says, he knows of no "strong drawbacks" to the system; "I don't hear very much.... Characterization of the colleges [Yale's equivalent of the Houses] on racial or other grounds. And although Yale undergraduates cannot cut their ties with the college to which they have been pre-assigned without gobs of red tape, "I haven't heard of any student voice against our current system."

Surely students at Princeton and Yale value freedom as much as Harvard undergraduates; administrators at those schools, though, have realized that the high value students place on individual liberty need not hamstring officials desirous of acting for the good of the whole community. As a result, ironies abound. It is Yale--whose administrators profess to "focus on the individual colleges" more than Harvard does on its Houses--whose dorms have avoided the deleterious stereotypes that have afflicted Harvard. And it is Princeton--known for its stodgy, old-world outlook towards education--that is acting to break up homogeneous dorms and to encourage inter-racial, inter group mingling.

IRONIES ABOUND, TOO, on the home front. Harvard, more than its Ivy rivals, stresses its commitment to Houses that are representative of the College; paradoxically, its preferential lottery insures that stereotypes will surround individual Houses and destroy the ideal of the microcosm. Harvard, in the words of Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, feels its free-choice system "helps to increase student satisfaction with their assignment," yet the one of five students sent to undesired Houses--ones where the racial group to which they belong may be proportionately outnumbered--no doubt feels more embittered than Yale's randomly assigned students.

Harvard, in Epps' opinion, seeks "a kind of intellectual community,"--the "community of culture" once envisioned by President A. Lawrence Lowell, who installed the House system--by allowing Houses to develop reputations based on residents' interests. But in encouraging separatism, the College discourages the inter group contact that is the raison d'etre of intellectual diversity. Administrators maintain the preferential lottery largely in the name of the traditions that have grown up around individual Houses. In doing so, though, they subvert a broader tradition: what Epps calls President Lowell's "notion that people from different social classes were to rub shoulders together."

A random housing lottery, administrators agree, would successfully bring those dissimilar shoulders together. None worry that a random lottery would significantly impede the support services provided for minority groups by Houses in which they are heavily represented; after all, all Houses would contain minorities in proportions mirroring those in the University community. Besides, support structures, in the form of non-House groups and activities, would remain. Most acknowledge, too, that truly random assignment of rooming groups would be administratively simpler and less susceptible to fraud.

The reservations, in the end, boil down to the reluctance administrators feel about limiting housing "rights" to further communal ends. Epps, for example, says a random lottery "would treat every student as if that person had not developed any views or interests; it would tend to assume that people are robots instead of human beings with values and tastes." Under current policy, he says, "You run the risk of having stereotypes and alienation develop. I would run that risk."

But diversity is nothing without contact, and liberty means little when it fosters closed-mindedness and separatism. Administrators have declined to tamper with the lottery because of one "risk"--that students might feel denied a privilege and act on it. That gamble seems slight compared to the risk Harvard runs--and has not entirely avoided--by maintaining a preferential, stereotype-reinforcing lottery; it is one that Harvard's Ivy rivals have taken successfully. Harvard is right to tread slowly when it may be encroaching on student privileges. But it also has a responsibility to act when larger rights and values--like that of a truly integrated University community, in which the individual's opportunity for inter group mingling is great--are at stake. Circumscribing those chances in the name of individual liberty seems a peculiar paradox indeed. But sadly it may be the inevitable result of an administration so overly concerned with short-term student quiescence that it overlooks the more lasting benefit--to the individual and the institution--of a richer community.