<p>One of the interesting aspects of the system is that the colleges DO develop personalities, through the natural variations you get with random selection, but those personalities are very fluid and subject to change in a relatively short period of time. When I was a freshman, my college was essentially the English Majors On Acid college, and its most distinctive feature was a weekly Master’s Tea where tea was hard to come by but whiskey sours were served by the punchbowl, and (after a few whiskey sours) the master’s wife could sometimes be persuaded to sing naughty songs from the '20s (when she had clearly been hot stuff). (Sample lyric: “Eddie took me to see the Coit Memorial Tower / He said it reminded him of his hidden power.”) Within two years, we were unquestionably the Jock College, with a round table in our dining hall that would often feature four or five team captains and a couple of Olympians. But we also had two future TV stars, a guy who would win his first Pulitzer Prize within five years of graduation, three future Supreme Court clerks (and one future top law school dean), one of the most prominent campus feminists, the originator of those "A Day In The Life Of . . . " books, and a future top political strategist, along with any number of English majors, on acid or not. It was a lot of fun, and I still feel close to a lot of those people.</p>