A Grating Problem

In the dead of winter last January, the City of Cambridge installed brand new steel grates over windows and heating vents at a municipally-owned parking garage in Central Square to keep out unwanted homeless people and vandals. The measure soon won widespread support from local businessmen and patrons.

Two weeks later, Harvard tried the same tactic to keep homeless men from sleeping on top of heating vents located just outside of Leverett House--but the response from students, city residents, and nationwide audiences was far different.

To insure the safety of students who felt threatened by the vagrants at the entrance of their dining hall, the masters of Leverett installed the steel barriers outside the dormitory. But when several homeless men began sticking their arms and legs through the metal grates in search of warmth, the uproar on campus attracted both the attention of the national media and the ire of America.

Unlike their Cambridge counterparts, the house masters decided to erect the $850 metal grates on the coldest night of the winter. And unlike Cambridge, this was Harvard.

For one week last January, a pack of reporters from every major media outlet descended upon Cambridge and put the University's seemingly callous action in America's spotlight. Dozens of phone calls from every state in the Union flooded the Harvard News Office in what turned out to be a public relations fiasco of national proportions.

"[The Leverett House incident] only supports my theory that by virtue of its constituency, Harvard is held to an extraordinarily high standard of behavior," says Jacqueline A. O'Neill, associate vice president for government and community affairs.

In Leverett House, the atmosphere grew tense and divisive as 300 of the house's 450 residents signed a petition demanding the removal of the grates. "On the one hand, people were terribly concerned about the danger posed by homeless people," says house resident Julie S. Schrager '86, who described the situation for the CBS Evening News. "But on the other hand, there were very compassionate people who couldn't see the danger, but only the problems faced by those [homeless] people."

Special house committee meetings took up the issues and two new student-administrator groups were created to grapple with the security and homeless problems facing Leverett and for that matter, the rest of Harvard.

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 staged impromptu press conferences later that week defending the Leverett House masters' decision but acknowledging that the College had to seek solutions as well as defenses. "Just putting up the grates is not an adequate answer to the issue," Jewett told reporters. "I think we ought to be trying to help [the homeless] find better alternatives."

Five days after they were installed, Jewett ordered the grates dismantled. The television cameras stopped rolling. And the issue of homelessness silently receded into the background as the nearby river began to thaw.

Administrators now say the grates came down to diffuse the tense situation in the house and to keep pictures of homeless men on Harvard grates off 30-second television spots. "As long as they stood there, those grates were visible physical symbols of a large institution's callousness to poor disadvantaged people," O'Neill says about the negative publicity. "They were not taken down because they were mistakes."

Dean Jewett says that the presence of the grates "prevented people from thinking about the more important issues of homelessness."

For several weeks thereafter, homelessness found itself at the forefront of campus news and activity. While shelter workers around Harvard Square reported that community volunteerism among students increased by at least two dozen after the incident, other undergraduates lobbied for more shelters at Cambridge city hall. Then in March, the University sponsored one of the nation's first conferences on problems affecting the homeless population.

Further into the semester, however, student and administrator enthusiasm returned to pre-grate levels. "Once the grates were removed, the outrage disappeared and the students stopped caring," says Undergraduate Council Chairman Brian C. Offutt '87, a Leverett resident. "It became a non-issue."

Six months after the incident, students, shelter officials and Cambridge politicians are saying that Harvard's insensitive posture toward the area's homeless population hasn't changed significantly. "The University took the easiest way out by taking the grates off and realizing that the media would not, and could not, concentrate on the more serious issue of homelessness," says Schrager, who volunteered for the Food Salvage. "Harvard wasn't caring, only clever."

Last January's public relations fiasco had little impact on the powers-that-be in Massachusetts Hall, according to Cambridge City Councilor David E. Sullivan. "Aside from [President Derek C.] Bok's program which benefitted students working in shelters, I can't think of anything the Harvard administration has done [to alleviate the homelessness problem in Cambridge]. Perhaps they forgot about it."

Sullivan argues that homelessness is still a hot issue in the city. In Central Square, local residents this spring defeated a proposal to convert an abandoned church building into a 20-bed shelter, while in the western section of Cambridge, neighbors are currently trying to prevent a non-profit group from establishing a home for mental patients in the area.

"There is definitely a role for an institution [like Harvard] to play in the community with a problem that obviously affects the student body," says David A. Whitty, executive director of a Boston-based shelter. "The line between an institution and the community is not a wall over which problems do not flow."

Whitty says he was disappointed that Harvard would not agree to a plan--forwarded by Adams House Co-Master Jana Kiely--to lease a tract of land from St. Paul Church and set aside a portion of the property for homeless families and start a center for socially-conscious students.

Campus politician Offutt agrees with the shelter's director. "I think the University ought to do something since there is some evidence that they've contributed to the problem of pushing people out of Cambridge and destroying parts of neighborhoods."

"Even if they haven't significantly contributed to the homelessness problem, the University has a responsibility as Cambridge's number one corporate citizen," Offutt adds.

Yet some administrators sense that all the adverse publicity Harvard received during "the great grate story of 1986" painted an inaccurate picture of Leverett House and the University's efforts to alleviate homelessness. Richard J. Doherty '76, director of state relations, says that in addition to the March conference on homelessness, Harvard will be sponsoring a benefit for Shelter, Inc. later this month.

Earlier this spring, the University also brought in medical personnel to examine the homeless men occupying the heating grates in an effort to determine the extent of their physical and mental disabilities, says Leverett House Senior Tutor Thomas A. Dingman '67.

"The role of Harvard is not to throw money at the problem," O'Neill asserts. "While the University can collect data on the subject and influence policy-makers at the federal level, there is a greater role for individual volunteers who want to do something personally."

Responding to the suggestion that Harvard, the largest landowner in Cambridge, should donate land for a shelter, O'Neill says, "It's not clear that even if you had 50 shelters within walking distance of the grates that these guys would go in."

Although the Leverett masters have implemented a number of strategies to improve security around the house--like expensive, round-the-clock police patrols at the grates, better lighting at the dining hall entrance, and a new look-out window in the superintendent's office--homeless men and students' fears will return to McKinlock as soon as the temperatures drop next winter.

"You can't underestimate the importance of what makes homeless people go to Leverett House," Whitty emphasizes. "There is a fantastic gush of heat that comes from those grates, some sympathetic students leave sandwiches, some stop and talk and say 'How are you?' and 'Who are you?' They will congregate there next year."