Word: random
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...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...
...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...
...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...
According to Kelly, 17 is the "random number." In other words, the chances are more than random that a random number will be divisible by 17. A Masters and Johnson study found that the average male has a sex-related thought every 17 seconds; there are 17 steps from the landing to the door in Sherlock Holmes' house at 221b (13 x 17b) Baker Street; Harvard's College Board code is 3434 (17 times 202); and the world record for sitting in a tub of tomato ketchup is 17 hours...
...truly random lottery, in which the College would apportion rooming groups by the sheer luck of the draw, would almost certainly make the Houses more representative without increasing tensions based on group affiliation. Properly and publicly run, it could also eliminate any lingering fears that the lottery is in any way fixed. And importantly, it would help reduce the upset that some students feel about being "quadded"; no student could any longer feel that many of his colleagues at the Radcliffe Houses are academic hermits...