College Increases Parietals

Students agitated noisily for parietal increases this year, and the Faculty almost doubled the number of hours during which women are allowed in dormitories, but the two actions were six months out of phase. By the time the Committee on Houses approved a new set of hours, most students had forgotten parietals (as an issue at least). But for a few brief shining weeks last fall it was the burning question for campus activists.

Daniel Magraw '68, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, said when school began that there was going to be lots of action on parietals during the Fall. A few weeks later the HUC drafted a resolution demanding longer hours, and took a poll of the college which suggested that about 90 per cent of the undergraduates agreed with them.

But the Committee on Houses wasn't interested--at least not in immediate capitulation. Dean Ford announced the news with a rare verbal gaffe, commenting that he and the Committee were "tired of the issue." Dining hall politicoes were grumbling, "they jolly well better not be tired of the issue if we're interested in it," and at a sweaty four hour meeting in the Lowell House Junior Common Room about 200 students agreed to try and form an organization which might go as far as a "sleep-in" to force parietals changes.

The parietals pressure group was sluggish getting going and there was plenty of doubt whether more than a handful of students would agree to civil disobedience on so parochial an issue. Then came Dow.

A real radical organizing issue and a real illegal protest broke the back of the parietals movement. The Sunday after the sit-in, Dean Glimp came to a "face-the-students" meeting on the parietals question--only 30 undergraduates showed up.

Though widespread student interest in the issue was never rekindled, neither the Committee on Houses nor the HUC lost sight of it. A joint committee of three Masters and three students was named by Dean Ford to study the problem--and that's always a sign that change is on the way.

That committee, chaired by Alwin M. Pappenheimer, Master of Dunster House, actually had ready early in the spring a series of recommendations very similar to the ones eventually adopted. But the Committee on Houses didn't like the slim single page memorandum that suggested the change and told the Committee to go back and prepare a more detailed report.

Cynics have suggested that the speedy adoption of longer hours (2 p.m. to midnight weekdays, noon to 1 a.m. Saturdays, noon to midnight Sundays) was a political move by Dean Ford and the Masters to avoid a confrontation next fall, but that analysis is doubly faulty. For one thing, the new hours won't free the Committee on Houses from the issue. Some students are sure to use the new hours next fall as a foot-in-the-door to agitate for getting rid of parietals altogether, or the more realistic goal of allowing women to eat at all lunches and dinners.

The main reason the Masters adopted new rules this Spring was probably simply that they looked sensible. The Pappenheimer subcommittee gathered statistics on about a dozen colleges including such outposts of gentility as Wellesley, and every one of them had longer visiting hours than Harvard. That and the rest of the material in the Pappenheimer report was enough to convince even some who opposed any increase in the fall that the time had come for some quick adjustments.