Word: randomized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Unless the housing lottery goes entirely random, Harvard can never ensure full diversity. Unless all students get to pick their house assignment, they can never be ensured freedom of choice. Both goals are worthy; hopefully, this new plan will be a healthy compromise between them...
More importantly, setting aside 25 percent of the houses for random assignment will act as a blow to free choice. Students are rational, mature actors, and should be trusted to make their own decisions about where they live--the same rights adults outside Harvard have. Denying freshmen this right of free action is to treat them as irresponsible children who cannot understand the consequences of their own decisions...
Completely randomizing house assignments--which will probably be the eventual result of changing the free choice system--will homogenize the Harvard community. The diversity of the undergraduate student body is produced by the individuality of its discrete units: the houses. By implementing a random lottery, not only house character--but the diversity of the undergraduate community itself--will be destroyed...
...Random House; 304 pages...
...everything, sugar crumbs on a plate which the previous person had left, the white gold of the watch, a parrot on its lead, its greenness seeming to vibrate." Such moments partake of the miraculous. Equally remarkable is O'Brien's ability to make Anna's narrative seem casual, almost random, when in fact each incident, each encounter, adds another piece to a puzzle that Anna must solve. The villagers begin to mutter when they see the foreign woman so often in the company of Catalina. Anna, who thinks she has retreated to this place because she has loved and lost...