This is the second installment in a series of features on issues that face Harvard this spring.

One day last March, just before spring vacation, 133 freshmen tore open their House assignment notices and found a computer readout telling them that they had been assigned to a Quad House that they had included in their botton three choices. Many of the 133, angry and disappointed, complained for the next two months to just about anyone who would listen. Individually and collectively they visited Eleanor C. Marshall, assistant to the dean for housing, to win a new house assignment or, failing that, at least a spot on the waiting list of those hoping to transfer to River House.

The freshmen also took their complaints to the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life. Members of CHUL's subcommittee on housing listened patiently, but promised only to look into the problem.

Ten months and countless meetings later, CHUL is still looking. In its January 21 meeting, the last one of the fall semester, the committee approved three recommendations on the housing system. But the panel also sent two other recommendations back to its executive subcommittee for further study and left the sticky task of implementation totally unsettled.

To make matters more uncertain, CHUL will rendezvous again today with the experienced 1975 student members replaced by an almost totally green board elected last fall which can--and apparently will--vote to reverse the recommendations that their predecessors approved after extended debate. Finally, when CHUL does settle on its final housing recommendations, they will go to Dean Rosovsky, who could veto the CHUL's recommendation and choose his own plan.

Before it slipped into the annals of Harvard committees, the 1975 CHUL had agreed to recommend that the male-to-female ratio be fixed at 1.5-to-1 in four resident Houses and as close as possible to 3-to-1 in all the remaining eight. Currier, North and South Houses are now theoretically on a 1.18-to-1 male-female ratio. The committee's other final proposal asked that each freshman be "fruitfully affiliated" with a House throughout the freshman year and endorsed continued upgrading of facilities and services in the Quad area.

The first of two recommendations referred back to the subcommittee suggested that each House be assigned part of the freshman class and a proportional amount of space in the Yard. This play would allow each House to choose whether to settle its assigned freshmen in the Yard or in the House itself with upperclassmen then filling some or all of the Yard openings. CHUL also tagged for reconsideration a recommendation that the House assignment system continue to allow student choice.

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As everyone knows, the central problem with the current housing system is the unpopularity of the Quad Houses. Those 133 griping freshman last spring comprised about 40 per cent of 310 students in the Class of 1978 assigned to the Quad Houses. The administration now says that about 100 of the 133 have moved out, with the remainder apparently deciding that the Quad was not so bad after all.

In addition, about 70 per cent of last year's freshmen included Currier House--the most popular of the three Quad Houses--in their last three choices, and about 90 per cent listed the other two Houses among their three lowest choices. This information comes from this fall's report of the summer housing study group of University Hall officials, and breaks an administration tradition of refusing to release figures on the relative popularity of Houses. This fall, it seems, they broke their own policy to demonstrate how many --or how few--students want to live at the Quad.

The Quad's popularity problem is a switch from the appeal it had in the first years of co-educational housing. For several years after 1971 there were always Harvard students ready to walk the extra distance to the Quad for the attractive sex ratio, four-class housing and other enticements.

But now all of River Houses have gone co-ed and in some the sex ratio has dropped down to about 2.5-to-1. This change has neutralized what had been the Quad's biggest selling point. Little has been done to date to make the Quad more attractive, such as adopting all-day shuttle bus services, although the administration is planning some renovations of North and South Houses.

Isolating this central problem is far easier than any tea-leaf reading about what will happen this spring. Three forces will apparently shape the final form of the CHUL recommendations: the unpredictable incoming student members of the panel, growing administration objections to CHUL's January recommendations, and problems of implementation that the old panel never had time to face.

Of the student members on the 1976 committee, only Katherine E. Fulton '78 of Winthrop House will come to today's University Hall meeting with a year's experience. While the new members appear satisfied with the proposal for four 1.5-to-1 houses, some may challenge the old committee's recommendation that the four be divided equally between River and Quad Houses.

Implementation of such a proposal would dissolve the Quad's roughly even male-female ratio, leaving one of the three Houses with a less attractive proportion of men and women.