A specter is haunting Harvard—the specter of a real community.

If you’ve got even a sprig of imagination, you’ll know Harvard’s House system isn’t working. Ignore the hollow claims—a House is more than just where you sleep. It’s also got to be a community that you wish to identify with, a place where you’re socially secure for three years.

But every time I argue for Yale-style housing, or for rescinding randomization, I get shot down. So I’m going to try a new approach. Rather than moaning about some other system, like a pooch howling at the moon, we’re going to diagnose the problems with our own system, systematically.

We begin with freshmen, for they have nothing to lose but their chains.

As soon as they arrive in their entryways, they’re warned about the need to forge another community—a blocking group—within a semester. Sure, we instruct them to enjoy their current communities and not worry about it, but really. Of course they’re going to spend half the semester strategizing for allies—it’s their only chance to assert control over their future communities at the College, as their frosh living community is frittered away at the end of freshman year. This is too much unhealthy pressure from the College’s administration, and they should know better. Discombobulated first-years don’t have the mental chops to deal with this, in addition to everything else they’re going through.

This tiny first-year problem blooms in the House system. Some seniors graduate only knowing a handful of people, many just two to three blocking groups in their House. Some sophomores barely know anybody beyond their blocking group (perhaps they meet a new one each year). It seems that blocking groups have now assumed the role of the natural unit of community at Harvard. They’re stuffed in one location and asked to get along. But they often don’t, and often blocking groups themselves fall apart. They are too small and tend to be too poorly-chosen to last.

But by far the most oppressive aspect of this Darwinistic system is the way it hurts unassertive, less gregarious students. These disenfranchised are absent from debates in the public sphere because of their passive natures. They are the ones who need this idea of a natural community most and are also the least likely to get it—hence, perhaps, our substantial rate of depression. Maybe this is also why Harvard students turn to extracurricular activities with such a vengeance (it’s not just résumé building): they do it to find the community not available in the Houses, which have let them down.

Community—here, House community—is not, I now appreciate, a sexy word—it conjures up unsavory images of sweaty Samoans smothering one another in their bosoms. And it’s an especially difficult concept to argue for because most Americans haven’t a clue as to what I’m talking about and why it’d actually be desirable. Perhaps this analogy then: a big final club, with bigger grounds, better views, and better people. Twelve Harvard Houses, mildly chummy with each other but reasonably competitive too; places where you’re actually proud to be a Winthroper, or an Eliotite, or a Pfo-ho, and entering a dining hall means enjoying the majority of people present, and not just tolerating them. Where common rooms are actually used to unwind and being an IM rep isn’t the Harvard equivalent of leprosy. You know, the kind of community that could last even beyond college.

To get there, the system needs to be revamped. How? There are a lot of ideas. But nothing’s going to happen until people become discontented with the status quo. And this cannot happen until they understand just how dysfunctional the current system is, and above all, just how great this place could be. It’s really not a pipe dream. Such a system works at Oxbridge and Hogwarts, and when I was at Yale last weekend, I saw it worked wonders there too.

But I digress here. Philosophers have always interpreted the world. The point is to change it. I am, indeed, calling for a revolution.



Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.