MOST first-year students view randomization in the short term. They wonder if they will get into the house of their choice, or at most, if they will still like the house when they are seniors.

But randomization is not a transient issue, nor is it a new one.

Alexis de Tocqueville neatly outlined every consequence of randomization 133 years ago in his immortal Old Regime and the French Revolution. As the book clearly shows, randomization could be the crucial step that turns University Hall into the greatest center of despotic power since the Parisian mob stormed Versailles.

Eliot Master Alan E. Heimert '49 has described the administration's actions as indicating "that the houses will be run from University Hall." His colleague, Adams Master Robert J. Kiely, agrees, saying, "Harvard is a very undemocratic place. Deans want to centralize even more."

Just substitute "provinces" for "houses" and "Paris" for "University Hall" in the first statement, then switch "Harvard" and "Deans" to "France" and "Bourbon kings" in the second.

The masters are now describing France on what Tocqueville calls "that fateful day" when Charles VII usurped the power of taxation from the people. From that point on, the decay into despotism was all but inevitable.

If President Bok and Dean Jewett (the king and first minister) steal the vital power of deciding housing procedures from the masters (the feudal lords of Harvard), the university will inevitably degenerate into the same sort of rancorous discord that plagued eighteenth-century France.

And as always, the lowest class will bear the brunt of the inequity. Those oppressed peasants, the students, will be left without the right or ability to decide their own futures.

TOCQUEVILLE lists three main consequences of the centralization of power. The first is that the peasants' resentment of their lords increased dramatically. "The more [governmental] functions passed out of the hands of the nobility, the more uncalled-for did their privileges appear--until at last their mere existence seemed a meaningless anachronism."

Right now, we all love our house masters, for we respect their dedication to improving our lives. But if, as Master Heimert predicts, the houses are to be run from University Hall, won't the house masters become as much of a "meaningless anachronism" as the French aristocracy?

How will students, squeezed into cramped, gloomy suites or even put up in Yard dorms, bear to see the finest rooms of their house occupied by a freeloading professor who just serves pastries once a week?

Stripping the masters of their authority will leave them the objects of bitter envy that will bubble in the breast of each of their tenants.

But while they learn to despise the privileges of the masters, students will give up trying to fight the administration. This apathy is the second consequence of Toquevillian centralization: A despotically governed people becomes unable to think for itself.

In France, peasants became so accustomed to being told how to live their lives that they looked to the central government for advice on such basic subjects as what crops to plant and where to sell them.

At Harvard, students will become just as docile when they realize that they are equally powerless.