Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says they are ailing. House masters acknowledge a problem in their midst.

But despite a consensus that House Senior Common Rooms (SCR) are no longer living up to their original mission, little is being done to salvage the institution and its role in House community.

Indeed, 70 years after the founding of the House system, the program originally intended to bring faculty into student residences has fallen prey to the rapidly ballooning commitments of modern life.

"The SCRs in many Houses are not healthy institutions," Lewis acknowledges.

Some Houses--such as Adams and Lowell--have taken steps to revitalize their SCRs by retaining only their most active members. Most others have implemented only the most minor of changes.

And although Lewis and some masters claim that increasing faculty-student interaction in the House is a top priority, there is significantly less agreement about how to fix the problem.

Educational Communities

Modeled after the Oxford system, Harvard's residential College plan is intended to provide a community that is "primarily for the educational benefit of undergraduate," according to a 1994 report on the College's structure.

Through SCRs, Faculty and staff members are supposed to contribute to residential life by interacting with the undergraduates in the Houses. In addition, SCRs provide opportunities for faculty of various disciplines to interact with each other.

The overall theory, some say, is to create a "family," where older faculty and younger students live--or least eat--together and learn from one another.

Yet the family is finding it increasingly difficult to make it to dinner.

With more faculty members living farther away from campus, in two career families and under more pressure to be active researchers and writers, few have the time and energy to devote themselves fully to House life.

Admittedly, the SCRs are partly successful: they do create an environment in which faculty members meet and learn from each other. And the majority of SCR events--while open to undergraduates--are designed to foster this faculty interaction.

The weekly lunches, seminars and receptions win praise from faculty and House masters--"[ They] certainly fulfill the goals of creating the fellowship," says Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles--but they often do little to contribute to student life.

Students in Kirkland House, for example, have virtually no contact with SCR members, although they fill out forms at the beginning of sophomore year that ask them whether they are interested in being paired with an SCR member.