House model lottery was fair

The frustration that erupted after last week’s house model lottery is mostly loose talk. The lottery itself—held in public, with lots literally drawn at random—embodied the kind of transparent, equitable process that the house model needed to get off to a good start.

This has done little to stymie student complaints aimed at the process’ legitimacy. The two most interesting of these complaints are: One, that a random assignment process cannot be a legitimate way to assign housing; and two, that the process was biased against greek organizations. The first of these complaints rests on conceptual loose footing, the second one is false.

The house model assignment process could only ever be random. The shift to the house model should not be just a formal change in the residential landscape of West and Central campuses; it ought to be a change in the conceptual landscape of housing at Duke. The watchword of this new landscape is equality—equality of space and equality of opportunity.

If the administration had assigned housing by merit, it would have implicitly stigmatized the spaces doled out as punishments to the poorest behaved living groups. Spaces are not equal at Duke, but crucial to making them more equal is that real estate is not awarded to model students and kept from reprobates. Houses, likewise, will not be equal—some will have more spirit, social leverage or group cohesion. But we must do all that we can to minimize the impact of space as a differentiating factor. Random assignment was necessary.

There is the further question of whether a random assignment process can be legitimate at all. The obvious answer is yes. Anyone who profited from or got dinged by the Room Picks process without protest has implicitly consented to the legitimacy of random assignment. There is a caveat here: For a random assignment process to be legitimate, it must be fair. All participants must have an equal shot at getting the same spaces.

This is dangerous ground, and here the house model lottery could have veered off course. It could have, as a matter of procedure, given first draw to non-greek selective living groups. But it did not.

Instead groups were broken into five categories, based on size. Groups were not distinguished by category—sororities, fraternities and selective living groups faced randomness together, as equals. The order in which groups were allowed to draw was random, although groups who preferenced Central Campus were allowed to draw from these assignments before groups who expressed no preference.

We anticipate the objection that the deck was stacked against selective living groups from the start. The administration gave all the best West Campus real estate away to nonselective houses before the first number was drawn. This might be true, but it is a solemn acknowledgment that selective houses will initially enjoy cohesion and social leverage that nonselective houses will not. Giving nonselective houses prime real estate might seem like a black eye on the house model’s equity principle. But it is a justified one that, by tipping the playing field in favor of less organized nonselective houses, will produce equality in the long run.