Students: Computerized Companions

When you take a bath at home, who cleans the bathtub?

Would you say you are: a) The neatest person in your group of friends, b) about average, c) a real slob, but trying to improve, d) a real slob, and happy?

During the summer, 800 incoming freshmen at the Riverside campus of the University of California answered eight pages of such personal questions as these. The school’s purpose in making this impertinent inquiry was to combat a major cause of student restiveness: mismatched dormitory roommates. Answers to the questionnaire, which focused on personal interests, housekeeping habits and study patterns, were run through a computer. Out came paired assignments to rooms. When the computerized friends got acquainted last week, most of them agreed that the innovation was definitely preferable to the old system of pairing roommates by administrative fiat.

Tossed together by the computer, Carol Berman and Patricia Marks discovered that they had similar tastes in clothes, tended to cram their studies into long nights before deadlines, and shared a love of soul music. They even had a similar hangup: Carol sleeps with a “security blanket,” while Pat feels lost without her own well-worn pillow. “I’m messy,” says Carol, “and so is she.” Don Denzin and James Sherry found companionship in a mutual appreciation of Thoreau’s Walden and a joint jam session—Don on clarinet, Jim on guitar. Carol Tucker and Lynn McElroy were delighted by the matching because, as Carol explains it, “we’re built the same and are both outdoorsy.” That already has led to tennis-playing fun on double dates.

Equally pleased was Riverside’s dean of students, Norman Better, who counted 35 requests for room changes after the first week last year, only five so far this semester. Incompatibility of roommates, he claims, is more serious than many college officials realize. More than 8% of Riverside’s 1,200 dorm residents switched roommates last year and “at least twice that many wanted to move but were persuaded to stick it out.” Even when switches are made, he says, “the one who is left feels rejected.” He recalled a case last year in which one boy with a fetish for cleanliness hung a rope across his room to isolate a roommate, who left dirty underwear scattered about. The rejected boy turned morose, let his grades slip, dropped out of school.

The computer cannot, of course, ensure total domestic tranquillity. One plump freshman complained that her machine-matched roommate “gets cold too easily and wants to turn the heat on.” Her thin chum countered that she can’t really enjoy eating cookies from home while her friend is on a diet.