DAVID RIESMAN '31, Ford Professor of Social Sciences, decided to live in a House when the House system was a residential experiment. The day after a story appeared listing Riesman among the first residents of Dunster House, The Crimson published an interview with Professor R. E. Rogers '09 denouncing President Lowell's House Plan.

Rogers found in the House Plan evidence that "the college is disintegrating." He called their construction a "desparate measure," and predicted that they would unsuccessfully inherit the fraternity's role in Harvard life.

Returning to Harvard in 1958, Riesman, an alumnus of the College and the Law School, now finds himself in Rogers's role as social critic of Harvard life.

In an article in this month's issue of Change magazine, Riesman described a contagious "cynicism and loss of faith" that makes the future of Harvard and other institutions like it "impossible to predict." The article is adapted from Two Essays on Harvard: Politics and Education in Harvard College, which Riesman plans to coauthor with Seymour M. Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations.

Riesman outlines a shift from "aristocratic meritocracy" to "egalitarian meritocracy" which has taken place at Harvard over the 40 years since his graduation. Aristocratic meritocracy, loosely defined, is based on subjective criteria while egalitarian meritocracy relies on objective standards such as grades and test scores.

Riesman argues that the initial impetus for egalitarian meritocracy came from President Lowell's early 20th century drive to upgrade the quality of the Harvard faculty and student body.

In the early thirties, Harvard was "mainly a New England college with some mid-Atlantic appeal...pre-meds, who were unavoidably serious, and the deprecated Radcliffe students provided an audience for an otherwise indifferently regarded faculty."

Lowell began the House plan to mix the often isolated undergraduate groups and faculty. The residents of Lowell--the first House--were chosen to allow a broad spectrum of backgrounds and academic interests.

"The Houses helped provide a 'critical mass' of people potentially alert to conversation about books and ideas, and to redeem for adult faculty an undergraduate body previously regarded as largely indifferent to them," Riesman recalls.

AFTER WORLD WAR II, the increase in the applicant pool's size and the entry of new groups into the Harvard student body tipped the balance in favor of egalitarian meritocracy.

"The boom in higher education...brought the news of the availability of colleges like Harvard to a much larger group of high schools than before the war," Riesman wrote.

The increase in Harvard's Jewish population, especially the shift from German Jews to their less-assimilated Eastern European brethren, was "decisive for the changed temper and tempo of Harvard..."

Riesman believes that there has been a corresponding decline in the institutions that had served as standards for aristocratic meritocracy. In 1930, Professor Rogers found a "decidedly mediocre tone" in the College fraternities, which formerly made for "intimate contact between groups of students."

Riesman now finds that Crimson editors, "who once took it for granted that they would not get top grades but would get by manageably well," worry about how law schools will editorialize about their grades.

The social clubs' influence has declined. And Riesman also noticed that he has received many papers in Soc Sci 136, his course on American character and social structure, from athletes trying to live "in the double world of the training table and its powerful antagonists."