The Dull Edge

WHEN I arrived at Harvard as a transfer student, I though I'd have no problem meeting other students. But since I've been on campus, institutional barriers have done their best to curb my social life. Part of the problem stems from Harvard's abysmal party scene and part stems from missing freshman year--the year-long mixer in the Yard. Transfer students are more likely to run into a brick wall than open-door party in search of a social life.

The greatest barrier of all is Harvard's policy toward transfers. I often get the feeling that the administration believes that we really don't deserve the same respect and fair treatment as students who came here as freshmen. But because we missed the first year, the University has all the more reason to make sure we thoroughly enjoy the "Harvard experience." However, transfers are affiliated with Dudley House and placed in off-campus housing like Botanical Gardens (a.k.a. Watertown), or Peabody Terrace. Geographically and socially, we are on the dull edges of the Harvard community.

Not only are we in the boonies, but our neighbors resent us as well. We don't live with other students who can share that mystical "experience." Both of the apartment complexes transfers are assigned to are inhabited primarily by graduate students, professors, and other Harvard employees; many have families and small children. And many of them resent their undergraduate neighbors.

I discovered this attitude one day in the Botanical Gardens laundry room. While I was silently adding Clorox to my wash, a blue-haired elderly woman suddenly turned from putting her wash in the dryer and clicked over to me in her orthopedic shoes. Holding a ball of lint in her hands, like a damning piece of evidence, she began her verbal onslaught:

"You undergraduates have a hell of a lot to learn about respect," she fired off. "You have beer parties to all hours of the morning, play your stereos too loud--and who knows what else you do!" Like a train, her momentum carried her as she gasped for breath. "You take up the space that used to be for visiting professors. Learned people would come with their families. You could learn so much from them."

Her tirade continued for another minute while I patiently took it all in. Better not stop her, I thought, she might get the landlord to rent my room to John Kenneth Galbraith. When I changed my wash soon after, I threw every bit of lint in the trash--you never know what teenage social ill she would attribute lint to. If I lived in a house, any house, I wouldn't have to defend beer parties and loud music to an octogenarian.

AFTER a semester on campus, transfers can affiliate with a house. At first I affiliated with Winthrop. But then I discovered that overcrowding wouldn't let me move in for another year. Yet because of the house affiliation, I could no longer eat in Dudley dining hall, where I met and hung out with the other transfers, who were some of the few people I had actually gotten to know here.

Finally I decided to tackle the bureaucracy on my own. After calling five houses, holding summits with two housing officers and running from North House to Mather House, and back again, I succeeded in securing a Mather single.

If I had accepted what was originally offered to me--which is what most transfers have to do--I would have been left off-campus until next spring. Out of three years at Harvard, I would have spent only one-third of the time living in a residential house. Does that mean I would have to enjoy the Harvard experience only one-third as much? After all, we are only one-third of the student that the rest of you are.