Feeling Out of Place

AMID ALL the pomp and ceremony of today's festivities, the group of students will feel just a bit out of place. And no amount of marching through Tercentenary Theater, singing Crimson songs, or waving to friends will make them more comfortable. We are the transfer students, those motley few who began collegiate careers at other institutions before coming to Fair Harvard. No matter how hard we try, really feeling a part of Harvard will be as difficult today as it has been during our past two or three years here.

A late start of one or two years makes it almost inevitable that transfer students will be viewed as somewhat outside the Harvard mainstream. The University's ridiculous housing policy makes it completely inevitable.

We transfer students never lived in the Yard, never grew to loathe expos, never took a freshman seminar. We never even got to throw butter on the ceiling of the Union (I was especially sorry to miss that).

But after we finally arrived at this old, famous and important place, we wanted, like just about everyone else, to fit in and do well, to be a part of this 350-year-old monolith. We wanted to join The Crimson or The Lampoon, to make the hockey team or the Dins, to learn something in school and write the greatest thesis since Henry Kissinger's gargantuan exploration of Bismarck's foreign policy (yes, everybody still talks about it).

Most transfer students do a few of these things--and others--thank you very much. But missing freshman and sometimes sophomore year makes it uniquely challenging to get some of Harvard's requisite exceptional experiences. The housing situation makes it hard for transfers to meet people, and that makes it doubly important for transfers to participate in some extracurricular activity. And, of course, participation in the groups that make it possible to have meals with someone besides a roommate is particularly intimidating for those just arriving at Harvard.

WHEN TRANSFERS are the subjects of intense interest from their fellow students it is too often a clinical interest. What is it about a student who would transfer schools that makes it impossible for him to be satisfied? How can anyone be critical enough to be miserable enough to leave his college?

Most of a transfer's first conversations here go a lot like this: You're a transfer student? From where? Why'd you transfer? Do you like it here? A friend of mine was asked these questions so often that he put his responses down on notecards and held up the right ones when conversation became too predictable.

Transfers have to deal with institutions before coming to other students need to be concerned. The administration here effectively sets transfer students apart immediately after inviting them to join the Harvard community: With the admissions letter comes the warning that there will be no place on campus for you. At no other college, except perhaps Yale, is the housing system so integral to the undergraduate experience. The University describes in glowing terms the role of the houses in providing the basis for social activities. Everything from eating meals to participating in the numerous house organizations is supposed to be a part of each undergraduate's life.

Housing policy, which has changed three times in the past three years, nonetheless denies on-campus housing to transfers at least for their first semester at Harvard. After that, transfer students may enter a lottery to gain affiliation--but not housing--in one of the residential houses. As an affiliate, one may be invited to live in the house, or one may not be--it is completely up to the individual house master. The overcrowding of recent years has meant that most transfer students have been lucky to be on campus for as little as one-third of their time here. Most of us must live off-campus in apartments with rental costs far above those of Harvard's dormatories.

HOW DOES the University's housing policy isolate the 50 or so transfer students who arrive here each year? It's true that we take classes with other undergraduates, that we can eat meals in the residential dining halls with other students, that we have as much access to University facilities as others. But while walking a few blocks to supper is not so bad, knowing no one in the dining hall is no fun at all. Although most sophomores spend their time meeting new housemates, transfer students usually become friendly primarily with fellow transfers. It takes longer, perhaps only after becoming involved in an extracurricular activity, for transfer students to have a circle of non-transfer friends.

Although the University seems genuinely concerned about the plight of transfers, it has been unwilling to present the only solution that will solve the problem: guaranteed on-campus residency. Instead, steps were taken last year to assure that some incoming transfers would have off-campus housing. The University agreed to reserve for transfer use a block of rooms in the Peabody Terrace apartments at below-market rate. The move is a partial answer--but not a solution.

Although a group of one-time transfer students will doff their caps today as energetically as any other students, the experience of transfers at Harvard will suffer unnecessarily until the University amends its housing policy.