Reconstructing Harvard

I walked by Weld Hall the other day and I found a giant tube running into my common room window.

Weld, where I spent a year of my life, is now encased in fencing and scaffolding. I can't get near the steps where I used to sit and people-watch in the Yard. I can barely see the forbidden fire escape where I studied illegally in the warm spring weather. I can only stand below, listen to the hum of the drills and imagine the dramatic changes in my once-familiar room.

When I interviewed the Dean of the Faculty for The Crimson one day last winter, he beckoned me to join him at his University Hall office window. Pointing to Weld, the building next door, he began to explain why the Yard dorms needed renovation so badly. My former home, he told me, was simply decrepit.

In my year as a Weldian, I hadn't known. Sure, the paint was peeling a little and the water pressure was poor. Sure, I shivered in front of a space heater when the room grew freezing cold. But I always assumed that because Harvard gave me this room, it had to be adequate.

When you live within a community, it's often difficult to take a step back and assess its problems. Things aren't always falling apart between your eyes--when I lived in Weld, I never guessed that the electrical system needed repair so desperately. And often, a home can be appealing despite its drawbacks. I loved Weld for its front steps, its high ceilings and its spacious landings. While I wished it had fireplaces and private bathrooms, I made the most of my experience there.

After a year away from Weld, I can better understand what needed to be improved. In the same way, I can take a step back from Harvard in the summer, reflect, and see things a little more clearly. I now realize that while Harvard isn't decrepit, a little reconstruction would serve it well.

The floors in my Weld Hall suite were made of cold linoleum. But a University official who oversees the construction project recently told me that all along, beautiful hardwood floors lay beneath the tiles. As part of the tiles away, leaving wood for the dorm's future residents.

Similar restoration would help relations on a campus like Harvard's, where students stand so firmly on their own ground that they often don't bother chipping back to see what's underneath. The crises I've seen on campus so far--about race relations, about sexual politics, about religion--are all fueled by self-righteousness. Students identify so vehemently with their own positions that they forget about their common foundations.

Many students here are so used to standing up for themselves--and so self-consciously articulate in their arguments--that they rarely bother to really listen to the other side. One student shouts. Another shouts louder. The first shrieks back. Each has a good point and a lot to learn from the other. Neither winds up with anything but a colossal headache and a shattered relationship.

The Weld construction is a colossal project in large part because of the elevator shaft. Next year, Weld Hall will be the only fully handicapped-accessible dorm in the Yard. The tall stairs--four painful, thigh-burning flights that made my roommates and I wheeze and puff for an entire year--will no longer block students from visiting any Weld rooms.

Impediments like inconvenience and effort keep many Harvard students from using the University's most touted resource: its academic community. Faculty members, many of them famous and most of them excellent, are here.

But it takes a fair amount of boldness and initiative to find them. All professors are required to hold office hours. But few students dare go--especially to the best-known faculty luminaries. And few professors take any steps to make themselves more accessible, by teaching or even visiting sections, or by eating regularly in their affiliated Houses.

The House system itself fails to live up to its promise of an environment that blend social and intellectual experiences. Students and tutors usually eat separately. Professors rarely leave the posh Faculty Club to slum in undergraduate dining halls. When they do, they sit together in intimidating clumps most students feel they can't approach.

Yes, you can reach a faculty member if you want. You can have an intellectual discussion with a graduate student. But students often have to climb a lot of stairs to get to even the mid-levels of the Ivory Tower. It's easy to decide that the tiring trudge just isn't worthwhile.

When new administrators took over the College last year, they decided Weld needed fixing. Now, they're down to business. The construction work is causing some inconvenience and disruption. But in the end, Weld residents will live a little safer, a little warmer and a little more comfortably. I'm happy for future Weldians--and sorry that the changes weren't made before I lived there.

A community isn't as easy to fix as a building. You can't just hire out a contractor and come back when the work is done. You have to lay down the scaffolding, strip the floors and dig the holes yourself. You have to really want those repairs.

Weld residents in the class of '97 will live in a home free of many problems of the past. Harvard students deserve the same. Harvard is a great place--so great that it's worth the work to make it better.