Residential tutors do play a more formal rolein the house, so they tend to have a somewhatlarger impact on students' intellectual lives. Thevast majority of students say they know theresident graduate students in non-intellectualsettings, such as intramurals and weeklygatherings for milk and cookies. But someundergraduates add that once they know the tutors,they are more likely to consult them for academicadvice and discuss their intellectual interests.

"The economics tutor was very helpful," saysDavid A. Isaacs '88, Eliot house committeechairman. "It's been very valuable having himaround so I can go bounce ideas off of him."

Resident and non-resident tutors also organizeinformal discussion groups and concentrationtables which meet with varying success, dependingon who has been invited to speak.

In addition, it is the resident tutors who makepossible the houses' only unquestionably academiccomponent: house-based tutorials and sections.Lowell's original plan envisioned house-basedtutorials for every department. While his plan hasnot been tully realized, many largedepartments--including History, Psychology andEnglish--use house-based sophomore tutorials.

"It was nice for me to know [tutorial] wasright across the way. It was good for sophomoreyear," says Clifford S. Goodstein '88, who tookhis sophomore tutorial in Leverett House. "I sawpeople more often and had lunch with my tutorsmore often [because it was in the house.]"

Despite a now-infamous survey that foundstudents in house-based sections of SocialAnalysis 10, "The Principles of Economics," didworse than those in other sections, house sectionsare on the rise, and students say they like theconvenience.

Lowell House seminar rooms are being used for53 hours of class time this semester, says WilliamH. Bossert '59, Lowell House Master. He adds thatthe number has been increasing for the past fiveyears.

The house seminar program also brings classesto student residences and it provides a forum foracademically accredited interdisciplinary courses.But professors say that enrollment is drawn fromthe entire student body, not solely from thesponsoring house.

Despite these house-based academic elements,students continue to look to their departments forintellectual concerns. Part of the problem lies inthe fact that the large number of concentrationsmakes it impossible for houses to have a residenttutor in every field. In addition, manydepartments insist that the graduate student orprofessor who teaches an undergraduate's tutorialsign his or her study card. As a result, studentssay they have become accustomed to going to theirdepartment office for academic advice.

Another change affecting house life is thegathering of junior professors and graduatestudents in department offices instead of thehouses.

In the past, many non-resident tutors andfaculty affiliates had offices in the houses which"made them almost by definition more accesible toundergraduates. [Visiting a professor in his houseoffice] was much less awesome than disturbing himin his Widener study," says Eliot House MasterAlan E. Heimert '49.

But during the 1960s, many of those officeswere converted into student rooms and many juniorfaculty members preferred to have department-basedoffices "for career reasons, [because] that waswhere the contacts were," Heimert says. So, ifthey wanted to meet their professors and sectionleaders, undergraduates had to join the parade tothe departments.

Out of Step With the University

So Lowell's goal of an intellectual atmospherehas to a large extent fallen out of step with therest of Harvard. That's not to say that the housesystem does not retain an immense influence onstudents' lives. As the place where students live,eat, have parties and are subject to Collegediscipline, the houses could hardly fail to beimportant.

More than 75 percent of the approximately 100students interviewed for this article viewed thehouse system as having a generally positiveinfluence on Harvard undergraduate life.Undergraduates say the best result of the systemwas the creation of smaller communities within thelarger College.