Eat Where You Want

THE UNIVERSITY should immediately end the restrictions on interhouse meals in the undergraduate dining halls. Arbitrary and petty restrictions made in individual houses are snowballing, creating a situation of advantage to no one and penalizing students living at Radcliffe and in the River Houses.

The immediate issue revolves around the attempts at Adams, Lowell and Quincy Houses to restrict access to their facilities at noon. These three Houses and the Union can handle the total number of students who want to eat their meals with friends from other Houses or close to the Square. But as soon as individual Houses begin putting restrictions on the number of students eating interhouse, the overflow begins to concentrate on the remaining and more liberal Houses, and they are in turn forced to restrict access to their dining halls.

The situation is ridiculous. The facilities involved are Harvard facilities, first and foremost, and the excluded students are Harvard students. The food comes from one food service, the menus are standardized, and in some cases the kitchens involved are the same. The problem is caused by the narrow attitude of individual House Masters typified by Zeph Stewart's reported comments about not letting the black ants and the red ants eat together.

Precisely why there should be any limits on interhouse is unclear. The intimate atmosphere of House dining halls isn't an excuse anymore, not since the Union was closed on weekends and each House was flooded with freshmen. Harvard has a centralized administration to handle this kind of problem, and it should act to end arbitrary restrictions on interhouse dining.