CORRECTION APPENDED

Yesterday was Housing Day at Harvard, a day in which earnest freshmen feel either doom or delight. Delight is what you feel when you’ve been lotteried into Adams. Doom is what you feel when you’ve been exiled to the Quad. For the most part, where you are delivered is out of your control. Housing is a crapshoot at Harvard, and all you can do is block wisely and hold on tight.

The housing lottery did not always work this way—Harvard undergraduates used to submit housing preferences. In the early nineties, however, it became clear that allowing students to preference their housing choices was fostering sharp divisions within undergraduate life. Most notably, although Harvard was becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, various undergraduate houses were becoming more racially homogenous. This alarmed College higher-ups. To correct for this discrepancy, randomization was born.

In the years that have followed, much ink has been spilled over the benefits and drawbacks of randomization, yet that is mostly an aside. Indeed, the system has benefits and drawbacks, but it is a method that is unlikely to change (at least for as long as Harvard College is in Cambridge and not Allston-based). What is much more interesting is something that could be witnessed over email-lists and inside dining halls this week: students who profess overflowing House pride.

Students from both Mather and Eliot conceived of involved video-promotions to excite freshmen about the prospects of becoming Mather or Eliot-ites—a member of the latter house even bought out two domain names on the Web for this purpose (www.adamssucks.com and www.eliotsucks.com). And as per custom, all of the 12 House committees have spent recent weeks toiling over the details of welcoming the rising sophomores. On a recent night in Adams (the house where I was arbitrarily assigned to live two years ago), dozens of residents descended on the dining hall wielding puff paint and poster board, poised to muster House pride. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

In a way, this is all rather charming. How sentimental it is to think of all of us putting aside our papers and problem-sets in favor of arts and crafts. But beyond the globs of glitter glue, the behavior is bizarre: housing is completely arbitrary and most definitely unequal across the board. The obligatory River Run many freshman blocking groups take part in on the eve of the lottery announcements in order to ward off chances of being “Quadded” (put in one of the three Houses a ways up Garden Street) is testament to this. (The next day of course, they’re all smiles as they’re welcomed to their new home of Pforzheimer House). Pride in your House assignment, one might go so far to say, is downright alien to the academic values to which most Harvard undergraduates ascribe; to have House pride is to take pride in something that was completely and utterly beyond your control.

Still, the exuberance for House pride transcends Harvard, and it may point to something entirely generational. Just as the housing system to which we all submit was born out of a concern for preserving diversity, undergraduates’ impulse to foster House pride is the product of our diversity-conscious culture. Diversity is ultimately a positive societal goal—there seems to be little doubt about that. Yet it also makes for strange behavior. When people are lumped together with those with whom they may not have much in common, there’s an impulse to find some connection to celebrate. When this happened to 1,600 Harvard freshmen yesterday morning, the celebration was of pride for Houses they may feel nothing for. So while there may be no harm in gushing over your House, be aware of how strange it all is.

All of this makes me wonder if perhaps ours is the ropes-course generation. We appear to be of an age in which we are ready to jump on the trend of any train at a moment’s notice, all for the sake of appearing as though we are connected to one another. The solution is to call for another lap-sit, and then another, and then another.

Oh, and by the way: Eliot House sucks.

Lucy M. Caldwell ’09 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.

CORRECTION:

In her March 21 column entitled "The Collective Identity," Lucy M. Caldwell incorrectly stated that a resident of Eliot House purchased two domain names on the Web: www.adamssucks.com and www.eliotsucks.com. In fact, the resident purchased www.adamshousesucks.com.