"Harvard goes to extraordinary lengths to find the most talented, ambitious, and interesting future leaders of the world," he says. "If you live with all of your friends from Andover or from the football team, you're losing something."

But some students say decisions about living arrangements are personal considerations, and should lie beyond the reach of administrators trying to create communities that serve a larger educational purpose.

"I think it's a student's prerogative. If they want to hang out with these people, they should be able to do so," says Joyce. "In theory, I'd want people to have to reach out to the House more, but I don't think it's the University's place to force them in this way."

But as Lewis points out, the idea that the College's residential experience should be tailored with educational goals in mind was a fixture in the traditional theory behind the liberal arts education.

In a 1928 report, President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, argued that students should not have full control over their housing, because they would naturally congregate towards students with similar backgrounds and interests.

"Large communities tend towards cliques based on similarity of origin and upon wealth," Lowell wrote. "Great masses of unorganized young men...are prone to superficial currents of thought and interest, to the detriment of the personal intellectual process that ought to dominate mature men seeking higher education."