Harvard College - House System

House System

Nearly all undergraduates live on campus, for the first year in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard (see List of Harvard dormitories) and later in the upperclass Houses—administrative subdivisions of the College as well as living quarters, providing a sense of community in what might otherwise be a socially incohesive and administratively daunting university environment. Each house is presided over by a senior-faculty Master, while its Allston Burr Resident Dean (usually a junior faculty member) supervises undergraduates' day-to-day academic and disciplinary well-being. The Master and Resident Dean are assisted by other members of the Senior Common Room—select graduate students (called tutors), faculty, and University officials brought into association with each house. Many tutors live in the House, as do the Master and Resident Dean. (Terms such as tutor, Senior Common Room and Junior Common Room—the House's undergraduate members—reflect a debt to the residential college systems at Oxford and Cambridge from which Harvard's system took inspiration.)

The Houses were created by President Lowell in the 1930s to combat what he saw as pernicious social stratification engendered by the private, off-campus living arrangements of many undergraduates at that time. Lowell's solution was to provide on-campus accommodations to every student throughout his entire career in the College; Lowell also saw great benefits flowing from other features of the House system, such as the relaxed discussions (academic or otherwise) which he hoped would take place among undergraduates and members of the Senior Common Room over meals in each House's dining hall.

An important change since Lowell's time concerns the way in which students are assigned to particular Houses. Under the original "draft" system, Masters agreed privately on the assignment of upcoming freshmen considered most—or least—promising. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s students ranked the Houses according to personal preference, with an impersonal lottery resolving the oversubscription of more popular houses. Today groups of one to eight freshman form a block which is then assigned, essentially randomly, to an upperclass house.

South of Harvard Yard, near the Charles River, are the nine River Houses:

Construction of the first River houses began in early 1929. The land on which they were built had been assembled decades before: Edward Waldo Forbes, grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was inspired by the Oxford and Cambridge systems when he studied for two years in England after graduating from Harvard in 1895. On returning to the U.S., he set out to acquire such land between Harvard Yard and the Charles River as was not already in the hands of the university or an associated entity. By 1918 that ambition had been largely fulfilled and the assembled land transferred to Harvard. The construction of the River houses was financed with a 1928 gift by Yale alumnus Edward Harkness. Harkness, who had been hoping to finance a similar project at Yale before school politics delayed the plan, visited Lowell in Cambridge in October 1928. He ultimately offered 11 million dollars towards the construction of the River houses. Two of the new houses, Dunster and Lowell, were completed in 1930.

The three Quad Houses (in the Harvard—formerly Radcliffe—Quadrangle) enjoy a residential setting half a mile (800 m) northwest of Harvard Yard. These housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard in 1977. They are:

A thirteenth house, Dudley House, is nonresidential but fulfills, for some graduate students and the (very few) undergraduates living off campus, the administrative and social functions provided by the other twelve houses to their residents.

Harvard's residential houses are paired with Yale's residential colleges in sister relationships.