The rule was changed back three years later and then changed again this fall to allow students to switch affiliation after one semester. The current situation may provide transfer students with greater flexibility, but the Loebs say that their student turnover is now too high. "It's just too difficult," Arthur Loeb says.

When transfers switch houses shortly after arriving at Dudley, it demoralizes the house tutoring staff and hampers the house's ability to provide social services such as intramural teams and dramatic events, Arthur Loeb says. The College and the Dudley administration have therefore begun looking for ways to make the house more attractive to transfer students.

After long negotiations, the College this fall opened the Lehman Hall dining room for dinner and began subsidizing off-campus housing in nearby Harvard-owned buildings. While these innovations have mitigated some transfer students' complaints, they have also altered the nature of the house, say the Loebs. "Annex housing makes us a half-residential house," Arthur Loeb says.

The frequent rule changes have made it nearly impossible for the Loebs to provide the house with a sense of stability, they say. But Jewett says that goal will always be out of reach.

Dudley House cannot afford to try and keep its student body stable and at a high level at a time when the University needs to register more students, Jewett says. "The purpose of...any institution[at Harvard] isn't to protect or serve themselves but to serve [the community] as a whole," the dean says.

The need for flexibility means that even Jewett says that he cannot predict what Dudley House will be like in five years or whether the non-resident house will continue to exist.

The flow of tranfer students into the University is expected to remain steady, and the College will probably continue to experiment with house affiliation rules to meet these students' needs, Jewett says.

"I would not be surprised if Dudley House were abolished in five years, but I would not be surprised if it were strong and vigorous then, either," Jewett says. "Dudley House has always had a survival factor."

The current situation leaves the Loebs to conclude that Dudley House will continue to serve as a processing center for transfer students, of whom approximately half may leave every semester. At the same time, they are left to cope with students in annex housing, some of whom keep Dudley affiliation while their roommates go elsewhere. And although admistrators, house officials, and other house masters agree that Dudley House is uniquely able to provide a high level of services for both transfer students and voluntary nonresidents, the Loebs say the strain is too great.

"We've had no meeting of the minds on where it's going at all," the Loebs say. "The next master will have exactly the same problem."