Freshmen Squeezed Into Claverly

With a minimum of controversy compared to last year's conflict over sex ratios, The Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life adopted a plan this week dictating the mass and sex of bodies in each House.

The chief bargaining points this year were women and space. The Radcliffe representatives wanted enough women to maintain a 1-to-1 ratio and the Harvard representatives wanted enough women to maintain the current male to female ratio in the "good ratio" houses--Adams, Dunster, Lowell and Quincy--and to "improve" it in the other Houses.

The Radcliffe representatives also wanted to relieve the overcrowding that North and South Houses have been plagued with for years.

These goals might have been achieved with a little bit of reshuffling, but the representatives from the Radcliffe Houses also wanted to reduce the percentage of freshmen at Radcliffe from nearly one third to one quarter.

Because the Harvard Houses do not accommodate freshmen students, the only way that CHUL could satisfy the desire for class balance at Radcliffe was to exhume and approve a plan, often discussed in the past, to make Claverly a freshman dormitory.

The number by which the official housing capacity of Radcliffe will be reduced and by which the Harvard capacity will be increased was pegged at 82, eight to ten students per Harvard house.

F. Skiddy von Stade '38, dean of Freshmen, said last Tuesday that he preferred Claverly over the Hotel Continental for freshman residence because of its proximity to the Yard. The freshmen in Claverly will live under the same system as the freshmen in the Yard, with proctors and upperclass advisors, and will eat in the Freshman Union.

Von Stade objected to placing freshmen in the Harvard Houses in small quantities without addressing the question of whether freshmen should ideally be integrated into the Harvard Houses. "I wouldn't want to set up provisions for freshmen in the river Houses on such short notice," he said.

CHUL members, who represent the sometimes conflicting interests of different groups in the University, agree that any housing plan will redistribute problems rather than solve them. Any housing plan they concoct will inevitably disappoint some students.