HOW MANY Harvard students can you stuff into a telephone booth?

Replace the phone booth with the college's house system and you've got the joke University Hall has been playing on undergraduates since the end of August.

Juniors in Winthrop House have no conception of what a common room is, several students in Dunster call seminar rooms with no toilets "home," and seniors are developing fond sardine memories to take with them upon graduation from Lowell House. Harvard's houses are packed to the gills.

It didn't have to come to this. The end of almost all off-campus housing and the integration of transfer students directly into the 12 houses was a perfectly good idea that should have been implemented long ago. In theory, the building of the DeWolfe St. complex was supposed to accomodate the resulting overflow.

But administrative bungling and lack of coordination among those responsible for the house system has produced an unacceptable imbalance of space and students among Harvard's dorms. Policy must be different next fall, and it is up to those who live in the houses, who pay close to $3000 for that privilege each year and over $22,000 to the University overall, to influence that change.

Under the current system, it is nearly impossible for administrators to accurately forecast overcrowding in the houses. Numbers of inter-collegiate transfers, inter-house transfers, and leaves of absences are not known until the end of summer. Assistant to the Currier House Masters Patricia Pepper says, "Crowding is funny. It kind of goes with the moon."

The accepted explanation for this year's housing woes doesn't even approach the true roots of the problem. In an interview with The Crimson last month, Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman '67, the administrator directly responsible for the house system, identified a drop in leave-taking as the cause for swelling numbers in the dorms. The Gulf War, it seems, caused Harvard's travellers to prefer the Charles to the Thames.

But a glance at the figures shows that this theory doesn't hold water. The Office of Career Services (OCS) reports that 86 students are currently studying for credit away from Harvard, compared to 126 last fall. This is only a difference of 40, not the kind of number you'd expect to throw an entire system out of whack.

In addition, many students take time off and then retroactively apply for credit. Others have no plans to study while away from school. So the true number is not represented in OCS's figures and the difference between this year and last may, in fact, be close to nil.

The natural alternative to Dingman's theory would attribute housing troubles to the incorporation of close to 200 transfer students into the system this fall. But that's not it either. DeWolfe St. now accounts for rooming assignments of 200 undergraduates. The overflow due to transfers should be easily compensated.

DEWOLFE WAS ALL PART of the "big plan," according to Housing Officer Catherine M. Millett.

"Big plans" usually conjure up images of a massive bureacracy with a mind of its own. The housing mess is a bastion of disunity. No central planner seems able to negotiate numbers between the individual houses.

For example, there is far from equality among house populations. While Leverett and Currier are just at capacity, Lowell is now in its "worst season ever," says Assistant to the Lowell House Masters Sheila Schimmel.

Lowell, like the other houses, had no time to prepare for the new students expected for the fall semester. While some, like Quincy, received no new transfers, Lowell was inundated with male transfers.

Lowell wasn't told whether the transfers would be men or women, and by the end of the summer almost all the male suites were filled. So now juniors and sophomores are living in groups of four in spaces designed for three. Worse yet, seniors are crowded into as many rooms as there are members of each rooming group, a practice rarely applied to those spending their final months at Harvard.

It seems that our administrators could have done a better job coordinating the distribution of transfer students. Equalization of overall house populations would have been a worthy goal.

But, when approached with the problems facing individual houses, Millett's surprising response was "I am not privy to the manner in which housing is distributed." She claims that internal problems must be dealt with among the houses themselves. With such an administrative vacuum, it's no wonder some houses find themselves victims of the "Big Plan."

But Millett cannot be blamed for all the program's problems. She is only a go-between for University Hall administrators and house staffs. She tried to keep the houses informed as much as possible over the summer despite the lack of hard numbers at her disposal. It is not Millett's fault that higher-ups failed to foresee potential short-comings of their proposal.

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 said last year that, with the arrival of the DeWolfe St. complex, we have "the most flexible housing to serve changing needs." Funny. Flexible usually means more options.

Instead of leasing affiliated housing near the Quad from Harvard Real Estate (HRE), the College now leases the DeWolfe buildings from HRE to house overflow students. A switching of sites has occurred. That's all. No additional flexibility has been added.

A more open system would allow houses to balance numbers of students--placing those from overcrowded houses into others that have yet to reach capacity. If that plan were too complex, couldn't the university simply build another dorm? They could name it Bok House.

But this simply is not going to happen. Harvard, like all recession-hit schools, is struggling to balance its budget. It's kind of ironic, however, the way a corporation with billions of dollars in holdings reports a deficit and a need to "retire" faculty and cut corners.

SINCE THE NEW BUILDING approach won't get very far, the crowded should band together to make themselves heard. Otherwise, disgruntled students cannot expect college administrators to take their concerns to heart. The Undergraduate Council could greatly boost its abysmal popularity rating (and perhaps even perform a useful function) by addressing the current housing crunch.

Officers in the houses know there's a problem. And even Harvard's chief executive acknowledges that the housing short-age must be addressed.

In a recent speech, President Neil L. Rudenstine asserted that the overcrowding problem was an issue requiring greater thought and attention. He also suggested that alternatives to the current system be found.

Dingman, on the other hand, seems to disagree. Instead of recognizing this fall's "unanticipated pattern" as a matter to be remedied, he places blame on the individual houses.

"We offered houses over their cap the alternative of swing space in Apley Court and Peabody Terrace," Dingman intoned. "We gave them a choice and not all accepted."

The housing crunch has to be dealt with. Once crowded students and unaccountable administrators acknowledge that something must be done, we will all be able to kick back, stretch our legs out, and breathe a little easier. Literally.

Dingman fails to get the point. No one really cares who actually screwed up. All a student wants is a room of one's own.

Harvard students are being squashed together like sardines, and no one knows how it happened.