Word: petitioners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Two days later, Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 and the house masters indicated that they would not pay attention to the petition, and would go ahead with the lottery proposal this year as "an experiment."
LAST week, two freshmen presented a petition protesting the College's new housing lottery process, and convinced more than 1200 of their fellow classmates to sign it. The Undergraduate Council agreed to back the petition and pay for all costs of producing it.
But there is definitely an argument to be made that the petition did not actually reflect student opinion, since it stated the plan incorrectly. Freshmen signed the petition under the misimpression that it represented the true lottery plan, and no one on the Undergraduate Council bothered to correct the mistakes...
The freshman petition states that the new lottery plan will automatically relegate 25 percent of freshmen to random assignment, rather than recognizing that some houses will reserve 25 percent of their space. It vehemently charges that "it is unjust to randomly assign Houses to some students," when, in fact, Harvard...
BUT anyone responsible for representing more than three-quarters of the freshman class to the College administration should have taken greater care to get the facts of the case right. The factually incorrect petition allowed administrators an excuse to refuse to read it, since freshmen clearly did not understand the...