These days, Harvard’s housing system dictates that all first-years live in Harvard Yard and upperclass students fill the College’s 12 Houses.

But what is now a fact of Harvard life was known in 1977 as the Fox Plan—a proposal which incited opposition from all corners of the College and made for one of the biggest news stories of the academic year.

Named for its author, then-Dean of the College John B. Fox `59, the plan was an attempt to impose a logical order on the chaotic housing system that resulted from the “non-merger merger” of Harvard and Radcliffe in 1971.

The three Houses on the Radcliffe Quad—Currier House, North House (now Pforzheimer) and South House (now Cabot)—offered a substantially different experience than those on the river.

In addition to their greater distance from the Yard, their physical plant was considered vastly inferior to that of the River Houses.

And in keeping with their heritage as Radcliffe dorms, they housed first-years as well as upperclass students (which River Houses did not) and their male-to-female ratio was much lower than the River Houses’.

Moreover, while the Yard was primarily inhabited by first-years, about 200 upperclass students lived in Canaday Hall, which then served as overflow housing, and had to commute to their dining halls.

As a result, Fox says, dissatisfaction with housing arrangements grew consistently between ’71 and ’77.

The Plan Takes Shape

When Fox announced the plan in January 1977, he highlighted five salient problems with the system—the inequities between Houses’ locations and gender distributions, the unpopularity of the Quad Houses, the differences in housing and advising between first-years, some upperclass students’ distance from their Houses and unfair lottery procedures.

“It was a system that resulted in a lot of people feeling they had drawn th short straw,” says Fox, now secretary of the Faculty.

Fox’s proposal attempted to address all of these weaknesses.

By standardizing residency in Houses to three years and moving all first-years to the Yard, it homogenized the first-year experience and ensured that all upperclass students would live in their Houses.