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More importantly, setting aside 25 percent of the houses for random assignment will act as a blow to free choice. Students are rational, mature actors, and should be trusted to make their own decisions about where they live--the same rights adults outside Harvard have. Denying freshmen this right of free action is to treat them as irresponsible children who cannot understand the consequences of their own decisions...
Completely randomizing house assignments--which will probably be the eventual result of changing the free choice system--will homogenize the Harvard community. The diversity of the undergraduate student body is produced by the individuality of its discrete units: the houses. By implementing a random lottery, not only house character--but the diversity of the undergraduate community itself--will be destroyed...
...Random House; 304 pages...
...everything, sugar crumbs on a plate which the previous person had left, the white gold of the watch, a parrot on its lead, its greenness seeming to vibrate." Such moments partake of the miraculous. Equally remarkable is O'Brien's ability to make Anna's narrative seem casual, almost random, when in fact each incident, each encounter, adds another piece to a puzzle that Anna must solve. The villagers begin to mutter when they see the foreign woman so often in the company of Catalina. Anna, who thinks she has retreated to this place because she has loved and lost...
When they were not firing muskets loaded with rusty nails into each other's faces, they were engaged in a competitive warmth-out -- Michael Dukakis trying furiously to grin, with meager results; Bush's grin wandering, with random abundance, all over his face and off into the air. Given his wrinkles (and his plight), Lloyd Bentsen's grin was hard to distinguish from a wince. Off to the side, Dan Quayle was giving high school students his version of the Stephen Sondheim lyric "Lovely is the one thing...