IN RECENT YEARS, unprecedented overcrowding has stretched the University's ability to fufill its guarantee to provide all students with on-campus housing--a commitment essential to the vision of community which underlies the system of undergraduate houses. The problem has alsobegunto stretch the imaginations of Harvard officials, and their latest proposal hits right on the mark. That is, if it is implemented properly.

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 is currently considering a proposal that would establish an overflow reserve of more than 100 rooms. Harvard would rent any unused space to graduate students and other affiliates. The plan is sound, as long as new housing remains as a buffer. If the reserve space should become another Claverly Hall by default, another nook and cranny for cramming in extra students, it would defeat the purpose of the plan.

Like all simple plans, this one has its practical problems--like where the space is going to come from. The most important consideration is that the reserve accomodations be near the River and the Quad so that overflow students can maintain ties with their houses. If so, the plan will be an adequate band-aid on the housing problem.

Ultimately, however, the problem is not one of overcrowding, but of underplanning. The perennial explanation for overcrowding in the houses is that University officials had no way of predicting the numbers of students that would elect to take or to return from leaves of absence. More housing will not resolve this uncertainty, though an adequate buffer of extra rooms will help.

If the University aims to avoid sacrificing the character of the house system--to avoid putting upperclassmen in freshman dorms as happened this year--it will have to rethink the give-and-take between its planning needs and those of its students. Administrators simply have to leave a greater margin between the numbers of students allowed into houses and the rooms available.