Deliver Diversity

FROM THE MOMENT you receive your application packet, Harvard admissions officers start hammering the notion of diversity into your head. Convinced, you sign on. Looking forward to escaping from the sheltered environment of a homogeneous high school, you leave home for the Yard with visions of melting pots dancing in your head.

Unfortunately, the current housing system--a leftover of a bygone era in which interviews with house masters determined house assignments--seems designed to inhibit the very diversity that Harvard so proudly advertises. The current method of assigning housing perpetuates stereotypes, creates needless anxiety among already overstressed freshmen, and distracts them from realizing the crucial importance of finding the best roommates they can, regardless of house choice.

This year's decision to disclose lottery numbers before rooming forms are due is a step in the right direction because it stresses roommate choice above house choice. Nevertheless, the only way to avoid encouraging parochialism and needless anxiety is an entirely random process for placing rooming groups in houses. A random housing lottery would not stop students from self-selecting into groups of friends with shared interests and attitudes. Nor should it. But by diminishing the importance of stereotypes, a random lottery would help to eliminate hostility and disdain between people with different attitudes and lifestyles.

Moreover, a random lottery would actually be the fairest way to distribute the college's unequal array of accomodations. The current system gives only the illusion of choice. Not only are students still subject to the chances of a random lottery, but they are also often precluded from applying to desirable houses by stereotypes which make choosing a house a statement about one's social, personal, and even sexual preferences.

No doubt many of the house stereotypes are only partially--if at all--based on the lifestyles of the people who reside in each house. But the widely held prejudices about the houses, which are an inevitable offshoot of the choice-based system, encourage freshmen to identify themselves with a given stereotype and reinforce the tendency to label and to ignore others.

The point of a random housing lottery is not to force people to lead different lives that they would under the current system, but rather to foster an atmosphere in which respect, understanding and tolerance predominate over prejudices based on ignorance and insecurity. Education does not end at the classroom door. The diversity of the student body may be Harvard's greatest educational asset; the housing system should encourage students to take advantage of it, instead of turning it into a source of anxiety and prejudice.