A year and a half ago, a group of students, professors and administrators from Middlebury College came to Harvard to find out how A. Lawrence Lowell's 70-year-old House experiment might be replicated elsewhere.

In meetings with deans, students and House masters, Middlebury representatives asked how they could create more representative residential communities and reduce the influence of special interest housing.

In response to increased binge drinking, the homogenization of residential communities and a renewed interest in intellectual life outside the classroom, many liberal arts schools are moving back towards this in loco parentis view of college administration prevalent before the 1960s.

Cornell, Dartmouth and Wesleyan have also moved away from elective, themed residential spaces like fraternities and sororities and toward more structured systems like those at Harvard and Yale.

And the House system which drew protests from students when it was first created, and again when randomization was implemented, has suddenly become en vogue at liberal arts schools which once treated housing as a personal decision.

Educational Communities

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The Harvard model--and those like it--stem from the idea that housing is properly considered one of many areas in which there are lessons for students to learn and for faculty to teach.

As House advocates see it, the liberal arts education was first conceived at the turn of the century as a formative project. While any school could teach a student information, the liberal arts school would attempt to fashion an entire human being. It was a broad mandate, and it has brought educational institutions into repeated conflict with their adolescent charges, eager for more autonomous lifestyles.

At Harvard, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says he is not disturbed if the College's method of assigning groups of students to Houses makes them uncomfortable--he sees mild discomfort as evidence that students are learning how to live with other people.

"It's a big transition between living at home with family members, to living with people you've never met before," he says. "It opens students' eyes to things they haven't experienced before, some of which they may find uncomfortable."

On the other hand, students, and some masters and tutors, have said students' residences are a personal space where the college educational imperative should not intrude. This camp sees the Houses as retreats from the rigors of Harvard's academics.

Many tutors of color were in this camp when the college first proposed assigning first-year students to Houses randomly. They charged that, in a predominately white university, students of color needed to congregate to achieve a critical mass and comfort level.

Becoming Like Harvard

For many years, Harvard's treatment of residential life as a component of the educational experience to be shaped by administrators has been unusual.

One of the lasting consequences of the unrest of the late 1960s was the removal of adult authority from the lives of undergraduates at many colleges. And, as a consequence, residential communities developed much as students themselves wanted them to.

At Cornell, conflict between black students and the administration saw the creation in 1972 of Ujamaa, a house for black students whose purpose is to help black students "learn more about the economic and political forces that help perpetuate racism; and build the leadership skills necessary to create strategies and programs to eradicate racism," according to the house website.

Cornell has similar residential houses for, among others, Native Americans and Latino students.Wesleyan, which calls itself "diversity university," is the home of Malcolm X house, where no white students live.And Dartmouth administrators have seen, in recent years, a homogenization of the college's housing--which, they say is increasingly divided into sub-populations of relatively similar students.