Twenty years later, Lowell's Houses were thriving. In some ways, they didn't quite reflect his original intentions, but as colleges within the College, the Houses were creating smaller divisions that undergraduates could call their own.
Life was in many ways uniform from House to House. They all held annual dinners, which were attended by the president of the University, and they all celebrated athletics. They vied for the same little luxuries: a pool table, a dark room, a formal dance in the spring. And they worked to make their members feel that they were part of something significant. Nearly 200 Leverett House residents, for example, turned out to watch their team in the inter-House football championship in the early 1950s. Leverett was invigorated, fresh off its attempt to claim Gore Hall from Winthrop House in the celebrated "Gore War." Students recorded their pleasure at having tutors in the Houses, known to invite undergraduates into their suites for "sherry parties." The College held a different attitude toward alcohol then, using it to enliven the undergraduate experience: The Houses themselves served beer readily at House parties and Christmas dinners.
Houses were selective, with first-year students interviewing at their top choices to see which House would take them. The Houses in turn unified behind advertising campaigns in attempts to win popularity among undergraduates, which inevitably emphasized the differences between them. "The Houses ought not to try for distinctive reputations," argued Winthrop Master Ronald M. Ferry, "but they'll naturally come by them."
Despite the fundamental similarities in the way students lived their lives, the Houses did acquire their own idiosyncrasies. Adams House attracted would-be gourmets with its superior cuisine and was generally more artistically inclined than its neighbors. It sponsored, for example, its own glee club, arts society and exhibitions of drawings by the University president, all while fielding the worst House athletic teams at Harvard. Football players flocked to Winthrop House, where House spirit was less strong than elsewhere, perhaps because most of those who might ordinarily join the House football team were already on the College team. Lowell attracted studious, tradition-minded students who were impressed by formal dinners at the House's High Table. And Eliot appealed to "humanities-steeped club men," as the starting place for a majority of the University's Rhodes Scholars and Phi Beta Kappas, all "awash in Canadian Club." The student government urged the Houses to be understood in terms of
personalities," rather than "stereotypes." There was no single model for a Lowellite or Adamsian, and the profiles of the Houses were too quirky to be so limited. "The labels that are hung on each of the Houses are, everyone knows, more poetry than truth," according to the yearbook. Any student, its authors wrote, could be equally happy in any House.
In fact, the greatest disparity between the Houses seems to have been between the kinds of leadership in its most important position, the House master. Eliot Professor of Greek Literature John H. Finley Jr. 25 provided the most notable model over the course of his 26-years at the helm of Eliot House. In a given year, Finley attended every Eliot football game, ate at least one meal in the House dining hall every day, played a part in the Eliot Christmas play, chatted with students every week at tea served in his home and memorized the name of every incoming Eliot sophomore by the end of September.
The House system was not without its problems. From the start, Lowell's tutorial program seemed to founder, prompting a Student Council report in 1959 that lamented a lack of interaction between students and faculty. Lowell's vision of the House as an academic locus gave way to his notion of the House as the center of social interaction. As all the students of the College settled in to live and play football together, it was entirely the social dimension that cut away at the elitism of class Lowell deplored. More memorably, in the eyes of Harvard students at least, the Houses through the 1950s and 1960s served as a place that counteracted against the anonymity of life at a large research university, providing a place that was, often, familiar, youthful and comfortable. Decline and Fall
Lowell's move to restrict Jewish admissions was based on the idea that it is harder to build a tightly-knit community from a body of students with widely varying backgrounds and interests. Some difference was good, but equally important was common culture.
Diversity, however, was knocking at Harvard's door. More and more, the College admitted students it previously would have turned away, and the elite day schools and prep schools that had supplied the College with students became a smaller and smaller source for admissions candidates. No longer did large groups of students who had known each other all the way through high school have the opportunity to live together.
At the same time, the introspective nature of House life came under sharp attack during the student unrest of the late 1960s and 1970s. House football came to seem somehow unimportant compared to, say, the Vietnam War. To some extent, the Houses helped to cool student passions, but even in those Houses like Dunster that were home to many of the leading radicals on campus, a tension existed between the tenor of House life and the struggles taking place outside the confines of the undergraduate world. "People might go out and parade and counter-parade and then come back and talk in the dining hall," Cabot Professor of English Literature and Eliot House Master Alan Heimert '49 opined years later.
Two years after students evicted the Harvard administration and took over University Hall, the Houses went coed, folding in students from Radcliffe College and adding three Radcliffe Houses--Currier, North and South--to the undergraduate mix. Gone was the Mr. Chips-style paternalism that had been the model for a House master.
Even as the Houses stopped interviewing potential residents, the Houses took on more distinct personalities. Diversity of Houses was one thing; diversity in the Houses was quite another. "I do not believe that a community must have two of everything, like Noah's Ark," said former Adams House Master Robert J. Kiely in the days before random House assignments. Currier House became the choice of many of the College's minority students, who comprised about one-third of its population during the early 1990s, and the Houses moved more and more in their own directions. The Houses had less in common with one another, and the differences between them in many ways became too great for the benign rivalries of the earlier decades.
Student interest also became more fractured, in a way that undercut the usefulness of the House. In the 1950s, the College was home to about 60 student groups. Today that figure is in the neighborhood of 300. And as students had less time for their Houses, so did masters. Leading scholars found it more and more difficult to set aside professional advancement in order to attend House plays, although some notable exceptions occurred.
The College continued to grow in size, and the construction of Quincy House and Leverett Towers in 1958 and Mather House in 1971, has still not reduced House size to what Dean of the College Wilbur J. Bender 27 in 1950 deemed the appropriate cap: 300 residents. In larger Houses, students struggle to learn one another's names as a sea of housemates overwhelms them. And, of course, randomization hasn't helped. Though Lowell saw homogeneity as crucial for the success of his houses, Lewis' project of randomization is very much in the spirit of using undergraduate residences to engineer the social, and in some sense political, experiences of Harvard students.
In its 1959 report, the Student Council condemned Yale's "IBM system" of random housing assignments as inimical to true community. Ironically, it didn't take the administration's IBM system to challenge communal college life. The House system took its strongest blow from students themselves, pushing for diverse interests and bored with the prospects of beer parties, holiday plays and football matches. Lowell's House system may well have been meant for another age, one in which students enjoyed the same basic pastimes and believed the same basic ideas.
Today's system falls somewhere in between the Harvard culture of unmitigated individualism forged by Charles W. Eliot and the social prescriptives of A. Lawrence Lowell, providing little of Lowell's community and less of Eliot's freedom. But in the end, that change came from students.