Truth be told, randomizing student groups would have more of an effect on who I meet than re-randomizing Houses. Encouraging interconcentration dinners, a Math-VES tea, courses team-taught by professors from different disciplines, expanding the Core to include a distribution requirement--this is where the real cross-fertilization could come.

My favorite scene in Casablanca comes towards the middle, where a group of German soldiers have begun singing the German national anthem in Rick's caf, a supposedly "neutral" zone, much to the chagrin of the French expatriates in the room. In a brilliantly heroic Hollywood move the movie's hero stands up suddenly and leads the band--who had been standing quietly by--in an equally passionate version of the French national anthem, which has all the French in the room in tears. For all its daring, this is the most carefully choreographed moment in the film.

True pluralism is not easy. It has been wonderful over the past three years to meet--many times by accident--other people with the same passions, the same professed interests and the same favorite poets, and many more people with radically different views. How do we come to know each other as people? I doubt the way to accomplish this is to make blocking groups smaller, but I don't think making them larger would help either. Our social and political diversity cannot be so entirely segregated from our intellectual diversity. As long as disciplines encourage intellectual insularity, social pluralism--especially in an academic setting--will be implicitly discouraged.

Waiting for a friend during shopping period I overheard two strangers having a conversation about Wittgenstein, culture and the color green and introduced myself. They were not my year and did not live in my House, work on my organizations or know my blockmates. And yet it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.