If a large number of people of any type apply to a certain House, the University must decide whether it will violate the individual's freedom of choice and assign him to a different House to keep the Houses cross-sections.

The University policy today seems to set broad limits on the number of prep school students, for example, who can be in a single House. The limit is loose enough so that Housemasters do not have severe difficulty in enforcing the quotas.

Once you have some sort of cross-section in each House, how can you give Houses character so that they will mean something to their residents. With today's limited program, caused in part by a small budget, many students view their Houses merely as the place "where they sleep."

Although the Houses were designed after the English University colleges, Harvard's policy at no time has given the Housemasters anything like the power held by the foreign schools.

Housemasters at Harvard do tend, however, to set the tone of their House. Some masters have been hampered in the past because teaching duties used up too much of their time.

The House system was supposed to bring a certain amount of small college life to Harvard. Today, the full realization of the program has once more been delayed, so that the system will have to wait for a long peaceful period for a large-scale test of the Houses' potentialities