"It was the best thing I did," says Carey R. Rodd '71, now a physician in New Hampshire.
Rodd moved from Quincy House to Cabot House his senior year with his three roommates. "I think all of us felt that way."
"It was the best thing I did in my four years at Harvard," echoes John Burris '71, Rodd's Quincy roommate who moved with him to Wolbach Hall in what is now Pforzheimer House. "It was a very interesting and enjoyable experience."
Living with members of the opposite sex enhanced friendly relationships between men and women, according to alumni who participated in the co-residency program.
"Before co-ed housing, you would ordinarily only meet women through mixers or through friends," says Burris, now the head of the Marine Biological Institute in Woods Hole.
"It was easier to become friends with girls if you were living with them," says Wright, a Leverett resident who moved to Currier House when the new dorm first opened in 1970. "Having breakfast together is much different than going out on dates."
Some Unhappy Movers
But not all students who moved from one campus to the other were satisfied with the experience.
One Quad resident who moved to Winthrop House under the co-residency plan says she moved back to Wolbach Hall after she was made to feel unwelcome in the House.
"There was a systematic campaign of harassment against the women who lived in Winthrop," says Katherine Park '72, now a professor of history at Wellesley.
Park was one of 150 women who moved to the River Houses the semester before the full co-residency plan went into effect, with 50 Radcliffe students each moving to Adams, Winthrop and Dunster Houses.
"What happened was, in order to make room for the female students, some people felt aggrieved, and some guys just didn't want women down there," Park says.
She says some of her male entry-waymates urinated against her door and made life generally unpleasant for the women in the house. Park points to the hockey team members, many of whom lived in the house, as being particularly obnoxious toward the new female residents.
"The crucial thing was the ratio," says Park, who became friends with Rodd and his roommates during her time in Wolbach. "The ratio moved towards 50-50 faster in the Quad than it did by the river. That's why there were a lot of problems in general, because of the four-to-one ratio."
The controversy surrounding co-residency both before and after the plan went into effect often degenerated into sexist terms.
"Do we need to remind ourselves that when co-ed housing was first considered that the Harvard house masters said women in their hallowed dining halls would lower the level of dinner table discussion? That the Radcliffe administration fretted that it would be inhumane for Harvard men to have to live in the tiny rooms at Radcliffe?" asks Sheila A. Sondik '71 in her class 25th Anniversary Report.
In fact, according to Burris, the intellectual level of conversation actually increased when the men and women were mixed because the men were forced to abandon their two main topics of conversation: sports and women.
But for most, the co-residency debate was not the major event of the era. It was overshadowed by the radical activist agenda on campus at the time.
"I don't think it mattered a great deal," says Charles E. Gilbert III '71, who is now a lawyer in Hampden, Maine, who lived in Eliot before moving off campus. "In the context of that time, with all that was going on in the Vietnam War and other issues, I don't recall this as the burning issue of the day for the average student."