It is hard to attend Harvard without comparing it to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Acceptance letters feel as magical as those delivered by owls, and Annenberg Hall could have easily hosted Harry and Voldemort’s final duel. Most strikingly, in a somewhat mysterious process not unlike that of the Sorting Hat, an algorithm adjusted only for gender balance randomly assigns groups of students to one of 12 residential houses in the College. But for many students, housing at Harvard is no fantasy.
Although 97 percent of undergraduates live on campus all four years, many students are critical of a one-size-fits-all housing process that leaves them with little control over their living arrangements. Most find community and belonging in their assigned houses, but there are few alternatives for those that do not, and no clear process allows students to express concerns about housing to administrators. As its student body grows increasingly diverse, Harvard must balance the preservation of its unique history as a residential college with accountability to evolving student preferences.
Scandal and Segregation
The housing assignment process may be random, but the student experience is far from identical in each house. Dunster, Winthrop, and Lowell Houses have all been renovated recently as part of a $1.4 billion house renewal project. And while most upperclassmen live in the nine houses near the Charles River, a quarter are housed a 10 to 15 minute walk from Harvard Yard in the former dormitories of Radcliffe College, now known as the Quad.
Houses have their own communities, cultures, and sometimes politics. Winthrop House made national headlines when students lobbied for the resignation of its faculty dean after he announced that he would represent Harvey Weinstein in court. Former Dean Ron Sullivan’s departure and replacement appear to mark the end of several months of alleged censorship and harassment in Winthrop, but to many of its students, the House has not felt like home for years.
According to Caroline Kaufman, a junior who transferred from Winthrop to Mather House this year, Winthrop struggled to foster a sense of community in part due to a large number of standalone single bedrooms and a lacking tradition of house spirit. She also said that the Sullivans were a particularly distant pair of faculty deans. “People didn’t really interact with them, some people hadn’t even met them or even seen them before,” Kaufman told the HPR. “I’d think it’d be basically impossible for faculty deans to create a sense of community within a house while being so removed from that community in the first place.”
House community is also challenged by the lottery that randomly places “blocks” — groups of up to eight incoming sophomores who want to live together — in houses. “When the houses are all random, all these people who might have not interacted with each other are coming together,” Kaufman said. “A lot more effort needs to be put into fostering that sense of community because it’s not fostered with a mutual shared interest or a mutual shared activity.”
Randomized housing assignments have drawn even more criticism from students placed in the Quad. Frustration over the trek from the Quad to the Yard and the other nine houses has prompted both calls to reform the housing system and strong house pride from so-called “Quadlings.” “Like everything in life, it’s a trade-off,” said Cade Palmer, a senior in Pforzheimer. “You’re living further away, but you’re also living in better housing,” he said, citing the private bedroom he has enjoyed since his sophomore year. “It’s like living in the suburbs versus living in the city.”
For most of Harvard’s history as a residential college, the housing assignment process was not random, allowing students to self-segregate into houses according to shared interests and identities; Adams was artsy, Kirkland was athletic, and so on. Even since housing assignments became randomized in 1995, however, the houses have continued to harbor reputations that influence how students fit in. According to Caroline Kristof, a senior in Adams and the president of Adams’ House Committee, student experiences can feel predetermined by everything from rumors and traditions to viral YouTube videos. “This year our Housing Day video was unreal. Suddenly in two days so many people came up to us [saying], ‘Oh my God I want Adams now,’” Kristof told the HPR. “It’s so funny because it’s such a construction and it’s not based off anything,” she added. “They come with these preconceptions that come to influence the way that they fit in with their house for no reason at all.”
“G-rated” Living
Another integral component of Harvard house life is the presence of residential tutors, who are graduate students and young professionals that live among students in the houses, some with families of their own. In addition to overseeing an “entryway” of students, each tutor plays a designated role in his or her house; for example, most tutors provide guidance on a specific professional track or organizing cultural events.
Frustration with this supervised system of living led Katie Farineau to pen an op-ed in The Crimson in April calling for the overhaul of a setup that she said hinders social life in the houses. Although she graduated in 2016, Farineau said that the recent “climate of change” at Harvard moved her to implore Harvard to reexamine its housing traditions. “It’s probably pretty difficult to have a real college experience when your administrator lives next door to you and the other person next door to you has two kids,” Farineau told the HPR.
Farineau said that a system that houses students among tutors — some of whom arbitrarily enforce rules regarding drinking and partying — prompts students to seek out places where “they are freer or can do college kid things,” such as final clubs. She added that many of the activities organized by the houses have a “G-rated focus” that further drives students into other social spaces. “There’s a lot of talk about inclusive spaces as ways to make students feel more comfortable on campus, and a lot of that can be achieved very cheaply just by re-examining house life,” she said.
To Kristof, tutors — who are typically interviewed by students as part of the selection process — play a necessary role in keeping the peace in buildings home to hundreds of young adults with different schedules and lifestyles. “They’re not thinking about their own inconvenience. They’re just trying to mitigate what might be some kind of tension between you and other students,” she said. Farineau, meanwhile, acknowledged that many students may find value in mentorship from their neighboring tutors or enjoy their houses’ Disney movie nights. But she found it frustrating that they retain little say or control over their living environments. “When they enter into the housing system, they don’t have a vote every year on what that looks like,” she said. “Students deserve the right to direct their own experience … and decide for themselves how they want their community to look.”
Currently, there is no centralized process for students to convey grievances about their living arrangements to the College administration, which did not respond to the HPR’s requests for comment. Yet Harvard’s recent survey on student life demonstrates its commitment to promoting inclusion and belonging on campus. Perhaps developing a better sense of how students feel about housing — and responding appropriately to their concerns — is the next step to making the school truly feel like home.
Fly the Coop, Join the Co-op?
For students uninterested in a house-sponsored movie night of any genre, other living options remain few and far between. The only University-affiliated alternative is the Dudley Co-op, which houses up to 32 students and two proctors in two Victorian homes near the Quad. But living in the Co-op is not just about eschewing house life — it is also about committing to a shared set of progressive values.
Most of its residents are drawn to the cooperative and sustainable culture of the Co-op, where students split household duties called “stewardships,” prepare and eat a vegetarian meal together every night, and “frown upon cooking meat in the household even if you’re just doing it personally,” said Danielle Green, a senior who has lived in the Co-op since her sophomore year. Green originally sought to live apart from the houses to have more control over the food that she ate, but the Co-op quickly became her home on campus. “As a more introverted student, I have an easier time making friends when I see the same faces every day and when I’m eating with the same people every day,” she said.
Trading hallway bathrooms and cafeteria food for cooperative living and cooking allows students to save over $7,500 a year on room and board costs. Yet the Co-op has operated at less than full capacity, according to Green, simply because there are not enough students interested in living there. Despite an inclusive community and a simple sign-up process — no application is required — “I’ve encountered a lot of people who, quite frankly, don’t know what it is,” Green said.
Even less well-publicized to undergraduates is the option of living off campus, which is typically embraced only by nontraditional students. While this may not seem surprising given the shortage of affordable housing in the Cambridge area, culture is likely just as powerful as cost at keeping Harvard students on campus, considering that upperclassmen at nearby colleges move out on their own in droves. At Boston University, 25 percent of students live off campus, and over 35 percent do at Tufts.
Other colleges have embraced exactly what Harvard has shunned. Just a couple miles down the Charles River at MIT, approximately 1,100 students — nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body — live in off-campus fraternity or sorority houses or with a similar ‘independent living group.’ While Harvard is unlikely to encourage students to settle down in final clubs, it has the funds — and the demand — to operate more dorms like the Co-op or to subsidize off-campus apartments. Though Kaufman eventually found the sense of community she had longed for in Mather, where she said “the atmosphere was 150 percent different,” many students are not so fortunate, and affordable alternative options could completely transform their college experiences.
Over the past several years, Harvard has abolished its seven-minute passing period between classes, drastically changed its distributional requirements, and nearly eliminated shopping week. Could a transformation of student housing be next on the administration’s agenda? That remains unknown, but for now, students will continue to pack the Yard as Quincy Penguins and Currier Trees on Housing Day. “Housing life is something that Harvard has thought about for several hundred years,” Palmer said. “I would not be sad to see it continue in this manner for the next hundred years.”
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Daderot