Koo says the lack of diversity in Eliot sometimes made the House feel stale to him.
“I think the people who fit in really fit in and liked it there a lot,” Koo says. “What I noticed is that when the [randomized group of] sophomores came in it was kind of a breath of fresh air for me.”
While Koo embraced randomization, some criticized randomization for breaking up the minority communities that had formed in the Quad.
A group of 26 minority House tutors sent a letter to University administrators in the spring of 1998 arguing that randomization had destroyed the community support minority students had grown to depend on in some Houses.
Pre-Meds and Gossips
Even before randomization, some Houses had less striking personalities.
Currier housed a large portion of the pre-med population, while Quincy attracted many hard science concentrators. Lowell and Dunster House were also traditionally studious.
According to Sarah Rimsky ’98, who lived in Winthrop House as an undergraduate, her house was known as the “high school gossip, social House.”
But Rimsky says this reputation was more of a function of the thin fire doors—which made eavesdropping inevitable—rather than the type of person that chose to live there.
Gentzkow, a former Kirkland House resident, says that even before randomization officially began, there was already a degree of randomness as to which students were placed in the various river Houses.
“Everybody would put those down and there was still quite a lot of luck whether you got those,” Gentzkow says.
Adam Levitin ’98, a former Currier House resident and Crimson editor, says Currier was characterized by a similar feeling. It was the House of choice for an entire spectrum of students—those who wanted singles, who did not want to live in river Houses or who were drawn to the minority community.
“I didn’t like the character and the bustle of river Houses,” Levitin says. “Everyone’s in everyone else’s business. I felt going to the Quad was like moving to the suburbs.”
Homogenized Houses?
Seven years later after the fact, Lewis says he does not believe randomization has homogenized the Houses.
“That was never the intent and it has not happened,” Lewis writes in an e-mail. “Cabot still wins the Straus Cup every year, after all!”
According to Lewis, students are now “monotonically” happier with their Houses than those who lived in pre-randomized Houses.
“No House has to start every fall knowing it was full of students who had been asked their preferences and had explicitly stated they did not want to be there. And no House can take for granted that students should be happy to be there because it was, for the most part, their first choice,” Lewis writes. “Every House does a better job now, I think, welcoming and incorporating its sophomores into the community.”
—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.