"The council doesn't really negotiate effectively with the administration--they don't hold any cards--but they can come up with a student opinion," says Harmon, who calls the randomization compromise the "biggest victory of the year."

But many continue to criticize Harmon's plan, which has students randomly assigned among one of four houses they select, as merely politically expedient, and not the best alternative.

"We should have looked for a system that promoted the most student choice but instead we looked for a system that was most acceptable to the [house] masters and Dean Jewett," says the council's Residential Chair Daniel H. Tabak '92 who authored a rival plan the council dismissed.

But the debates on the structure of the housing lottery were also first-semester debates, and the specter of housing lottery battles several years down the road were not nearly enough to maintain attendance at the council's meetings.

No Quorum Blues

Much of the council's spring session was spent battling absenteeism--often unsuccessfully. The body failed to muster enough members to gain a quorum in any of the final four weeks of the year--although some council officers continue to maintain that by ejecting eight representatives who had not been showing up for meetings they had obtained the necessary quorums.

"I guess a lot of what we do is really boring," says former Council Vice Chair Noam Bramson '90-'91. "[But] that sort of stuff has to get done."

According to Bramson, this was a stabilizing year in the council's history and the lack of attendance is a natural, inevitable part of student government at Harvard and other colleges.

"The council putters along," Bramson says. "it handles small things well, it handles big things sometimes well, sometimes badly."