As the frosh settle into their new Houses this week and the memory of rotation fades, I thought it might be interesting to share a little about the history of the Houses and freshman rotation.

The story begins on March 11, 1930. The front-page headline of The California Tech on that day read, "Dorms Will Rise at Once!" That week, the donation was made to build the fourth of the planned student Houses and a new era in Caltech undergraduate student life was born.

Before 1930, there was only room on campus for about one-fourth of the student body on campus. A majority of students pledged into a number of fraternities on campus that owned independent houses in Pasadena. When the plans were made to build the Houses, a committee of nine students was formed to investigate student living conditions and make detailed recommendations as to the conduct and organization of the new undergraduate houses. Members of the committee toured the U.S., Europe, and Canada to find out what organization would be best for the Houses. On March 5, 1931, they published their findings in the California Tech.

In the report, they said, "The reason for the building of the new undergraduate houses [is] the desire to supplement the present intellectual development of the students with a cultural and social development." Also, "Students shall be given the opportunity to wait on tables." Control of the houses was given to the students: "Conduct of house functions and the maintenance of order shall be placed entirely in the hands of the students." "A resident associate shall be placed in each house to serve as a counselor and friend of the students, but not as a proctor." The report also recommended "inter-house and intra-house competitions" and the creation of an "inter-house committee." The committee recommended that each fraternity "move into a single house as a group…not to perpetuate its own organization, but to serve as the nucleus about which to build and to foster a house unity and loyalty." All the Caltech fraternities agreed, and they moved into the new Houses in 1931.

The report also specified that "freshman shall be distributed among the four houses as equally as possible," which set the stage for rotation to begin three years later. Rotation ran with no major issues until 1951, when, according to the October 11 Tech, "Dabney flagrantly violated the spirit of rotation." Dabney offered blind dates for freshmen and lent them cars for those dates. They also announced their social schedule for first term and approached frosh in their rooms late at night and asked them for their House preferences. These actions led to the first written rotation rules in 1952, which survive relatively intact today.

At that time, freshmen spent two days in each of the four Houses during rotation. However, when three new Houses were planned in 1959, the IHC was compelled to revise the rotation system. The debate became rather heated among the student body and with the administration; no consensus was reached by the time the North Houses opened in 1960 so the MOSH assigned freshmen to Houses arbitrarily. This continued until the fall of 1963, when the IHC found an acceptable procedure for rotation: Each frosh would spend one day in each House and at the end could list four Houses he was willing to enter. This stayed relatively constant until 1991, when frosh were first allowed to rank their House preferences with a number 1-7, which is the system we have in place today.

As the freshmen go through initiations this week and learn all the quirky traditions of their House, try to imagine how their initiation rituals might have originated from a desire to provide "cultural and social development." When you complain about rotation rules, imagine that they came out of a desire to distribute frosh "as equally as possible." In fact, almost everything that the Houses do today can be seen as a confluence of traditional fraternity practices and the idealistic vision for the Caltech Houses that was laid out in 1931. In seventy-two years, the Houses have gone through many changes, but most students today would probably still agree with the January 11, 1952 Tech headline that proclaimed, "Student Houses Combine All Assets Desirable to Students."