The stereotypes may have persisted, but student attitudes toward the Houses, and the involvement of associates and Faculty, shifted as the 1950s wore on. Dean K. Whitla, co-author of the 1974 "Perspective on the Houses of Harvard and Radcliffe" and head tutor of Lowell House during part of this time, said last week in his top-floor University Hall office, as the chants of an anti-Gallo demonstration filtered in through the open window, "In the heady days of this place, there was a tendency among students to reject people who dropped in for a meal and the like. But that's not so anymore. Students are really not formidable at all."

For one thing, the Houses have changed. Most important of all, there's co-residency, which brought the end of parietals. And there's also the new method of House selection.

Most Harvard administrators interviewed last week said women in the Harvard Houses altered the atmosphere of House life more than any other factor. Whitla said women living in the Houses "got rid of the hated parietal rules, which had been a burr under the saddle of so many people. And it improved the tone of the House and dining hall." Finley agrees: "The introduction of girls was a very monumental step in an intellectual direction. Conversation is politer because girls are not so bullish."

Whitla dismisses the notion that many women are actually discontented with their status in the Houses, a situation caused by sex ratios heavily weighted toward men, which too often makes women seem not human but merely representatives of sex. "Our survey [the Whitla-Pinck Report] showed less complaints about ratios than one would expect. In Eliot, women are pretty happy. Maybe the type of women who want to live in Eliot House like the ratios as they are now."

With all the changes that have come and gone since the Soc Rel class study, the House reputations, though perhaps of minimal import now, persist. Adams is still called artsyfartsy and intellectual (though many will preface the latter with "pseudo"); Lowell is still intellectual (though with its fair share of preppies); Winthrop is still seen as easy-going; Eliot is still snobbish, white shoe and conservative.

This year's seniors, though, are the last undergraduate class to come up under the old system. As one Adams House junior said. "I guess the seniors are sort of weird. They're the last ones to try to keep up the pretensions especially in Adams."

The new method for House selection may, to a large extent level out the ratio inequities. House masters can no longer personally select any of the incoming House occupants. A slick new computer and a slick new system are helping to erase stereotypes that still exist among the Houses. The computer also attempts to alleviate the discontent of those who get stuck in a House in which they had no desire even to eat, much less live.

In Finley's day, masters had a tremendous say in choosing potential Olympic champions. Rhodes scholars or paleontologists. "I used to interview everyone, read about them in the Freshman files, and find out who their friends were," Finley said, slyly revealing what he considered his secret to a successful Eliot House.

So the old systems of patronage have disappeared, and the sexes now mix freely in the Houses. Too freely for some. Students seem less hostile toward the Houses and Faculty than in the '60s, but less oriented toward them as well.

Approximately 50 years after Lowell's massive reworking of Harvard housing, the question still remains: Have the Houses fulfilled the function they were originally intended for? Are they small personal and intellectual centers of students life? David Riesman '31. Ford Professor of Social Science, says both yes and no.

"In social terms they've already done a part of the job of egalitarian leveling by destroying the huge separations that existed in an earlier era. In terms of academic, intellectual life, though, they have not lived up to the original intentions."

Student-Faculty contact has reached minute proportions with House associates often coming to the Houses to perform their perfunctory duties only once or twice a year. "Probably the majority of Faculty is indifferent to the Houses," Riesman says. "Perhaps a quarter to a third of Faculty has more than nominal involvement."

Rooming is certainly an important factor in undergraduate happiness at Harvard, but the degree to which the Oxford-style House system will affect a student's four years here is uncertain. Riesman speculates that a small House with a lot of community feeling would reduce the anxieties felt throughout the College. Harvard he said, "has done much less than it might have to respond to the sense of anomie and alienation that students feel."

That real sense of community Lowell wanted to focus undergraduate life around seems long gone. "We're up against nearly hopeless odds in creating any community feeling--and the more talk there is of community the less effort there seems to be made on everyone's part," Reisman said.