According to Dingman, these students would apply to River Houses that they perceived as less popular to ensure that they would not be exiled to the Quad.
But for some, in particular African-American students, the Quad was the top choice.
Lewis recalls that African-American students told him that by choosing the Quad, they intended to make “a statement of being in but not of Harvard.”
In 1990, due to concerns about students self-segregating in certain Houses, administrators shifted to a non-ordered four-choice system.
But the composition of the Houses did not change.
The 1994 Report on the Structure of Harvard College, written by a committee which Lewis co-chaired, stated, “Our Committee is troubled that pronounced variations in the populations of the various Houses—with some Houses still having disproportionate numbers of varsity athletes, or members of certain ethnic or religious groups—result in those students being, as one person put it,‘educationally deprived’ because they have contact only with a somewhat homogeneous group of their peers.”
In 1996, The Crimson reported that only 4.8 percent of Eliot, Winthrop, and Kirkland residents were African-American, as opposed to 24.6 percent of residents of the Quad Houses.
After he took over as dean of the College in 1995, Lewis took over an effort begun his predecessor L. Fred Jewett ’57 to transition to a fully randomized housing lottery process.
The student-choice system “allowed the Masters and the House administrations and the College...to avoid problems that were problems of a minority of the Harvard population if that minority was underrepresented in their own House,” Lewis said.
This problem, Lewis recalls, was reflected in the sentiment expressed by some that homosexual students belonged in Adams.
Lewis recalls being disturbed by statements to the effect: “‘Oh, you’re gay and you’re unhappy. Well, why don’t you go to Adams House? They can probably take care of you.’”
In the spring of 1996, the first class of freshmen received letters assigning them to Houses which they had had no say at all in selecting.
Administrators tinkered with the system to add gender controls in 1997 and to reduce the maximum size of blocking groups from 16 to 8 in 2000.
Explaining the justification for the current eight-student rule, McIntosh mused, “Eight is enough for students to feel like they’re probably going to have maybe two or three suites, depending on the size of the rooming groups, of friends, and they’ll have other friends in the House, but at the same time, we won’t end up with floors or entryways of just a peer group. It seemed kind of arbitrary, and in some ways, it is, because what’s the difference between seven or nine?”
But other than those adjustments, administrators say that the existing fully randomized process has seen little change in the past decade and a half because it has effectively forced every student to confront diversity in his or her House.
As Lewis sees it, his experiment worked. “Randomization had the effect of making any problem everyone’s problem.”
—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Jane Seo can be reached at janeseo@college.harvard.edu.