About one quarter of the students, he says, do not get their first choice. So why not arrange it so that this 26 percent is divided equally among the Houses which are not yet filled. In other words, he explains, dividing the unhappy people evenly would prevent the creation of one house full of people who do not want to be there.

While these proposals may appear radical to some, they do not suggest a reversion to the older system, which began with the inception of the House plan in the early 1930s, and survived until 1972.

Under the general principle of "master's choice," application to a House became almost as personal and complex as application to the College itself. House masters were allowed to choose a large portion of the students accepted to their Houses, on the basis of written applications and interviews. Fox describes the system as one with many checks and balances.

The masters benefit from having residents who want to live in the House, who specifically applied, he says. And the fact that there were uniform quotas for certain characteristics prevented the Houses from becoming entirely homogenous For example, administrators remember, there could only be a certain number of truly "preppie" people in a given House.

Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus Reisman '31, who helped craft the House system and who was an associate of both Quincy and North Houses, says he is still in favor of the old system.

"I'm for master's choice--for Houses to have a timbre, a tone," Reisman says, adding that because a master could only choose a maximum of 30 percent of the future population, and these would all be from those who wanted to choose the House, the old system was no more conductive to homogeneity than the present one.

In 1972, however, the system had to be further modified to accommodate women, who for the first time were integrated into the residential House system along with the dorms in the Radcliffe Quadrangle. At that point, the prospect of combining gender ratios with quotas for certain characteristics made the master's choice system simply unfeasible, and the present lottery was established.

Now, it appears to many that what Fox describes as a cyclical response to the system may be experiencing a downswing in student satisfaction. But College officials say they will wait for a concrete proposal from the council before they take a position on whether to change the system. And such a proposal would require a general student consensus. If the Undergraduate Council pursues the issue of the lottery enough and establishes a mandate for change, then this may be the year for reform of a system that has been in place for well over a decade.

And even if the system doesn't change a bit, the freshman year housing lottery will still be the most talked-about aspect of March.