At Points during the spring semester, the on-line newsgroup harvard.general was filled with hundreds of postings from students on both sides, the majority overwhelmingly opposed to randomization.
When Jewett finally made the decision to randomize in mid-May pockets of campus activism appeared. Two hundred students rallied outside University Hall in the biggest protest in recent years.
Small groups of students wrote letters to national Harvard Clubs, met with Jewett, gathered 1,000 student signatures on a petition against randomization and discussed further action.
Jewett stood firm in his decision, however.
"There are some cases where you have to make choices and make decisions that aren't going to satisfy everybody," Jewett said after the protest.
"It's not a situation where you have an absolutely perfect decision that is going to please everybody, and on balance, I think we should try this one," he added.
Jewett softened his decision by adding that if the system did not work out after a few years, it could always be changed.
Lewis, who will succeed Jewett on July 1, is not likely to overturn the decision.
"I have no immediate plans to reconsider Dean Jewett's decision on this, and I agree with his statement that the decision ought to stand for three or four years before it is evaluated," Lewis wrote in an e-mail last week.
But student protesters are still hoping.
"I think this is the beginning, not the end," said co-organizer of the protest John D. Shepherd '95. "I think the administration can't help but reconsider its decision."
At least one administrator, Master of Adams House Robert J. Kiely, has stood behind the students in their quest for choice.
"The least diverse of our houses are more than 100 times as diverse as The Class of 1999 Early in the spring semester, Jewett said hewanted to decide the question of randomizationbefore May 1, when prospective first-years had tomail in their acceptance to Harvard. That did not happen because Jewett said hedecided the matter was not that pressing. Read more in News
