Humanities Quadded

The idea of a Humanities Quad was pure 1960s. It was about getting together, loving, sharing and maybe, just maybe, smoking a little grass. It was together, not apart. It was Woodstock I, not Whitewater. It was the 1969 World Series, not the baseball strike. It was the Peace Corps, not a recruiting meeting for Goldman Sachs. It was John and Yoko, not Woody and Soon-Yi.

When the weary but insanely upbeat Faculty director of planning, Philip J. Parsons, first talked about the Quad, he talked about the faculty cooperation it would inspire. Professors, he and others maintained, were simply dying to interact and converse with their colleagues but remained hopelessly constrained by divides like the marathon-like 300-yard walk between Boylston Hall, site of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Burr Hall, site of Hist and Lit.

With the Quad as it was first conceived, such divisions would be plastered over. The Freshman Union would be renovated, and everyone would be happy. Folklore and Mythology could swap tales with Women's Studies. Classics professors could find out what they had in common with their colleagues in Afro-Am. Those crazy folks in Comparative Religion could get together with all kinds of students and professors on the weekends and have a sort of, well, mind-expanding session.

Just think about the stimulating intellectual interplay that could take place between academic starlets like oh, let's say Professor of Afro-American Studies Cornel West '74 (on leave 1994-95) and Professor of English and American Literature D.A. Miller (on leave 1994-95):

West: "In for you mail, D.A.?"

Miller: "Yep. You too?"

West: "Yes. It's nice to finally get up here. It's my day off from the book tour."

Miller: "By the way, I hear it's selling well."

West: "Thanks."

Miller: "Well, take it easy. Maybe I'll catch you at the Faculty Club kegger on Saturday night."

Such a conversation could have been reality, but then the '60s vision met the 1990s. There are more people in the world now, so everyone wants their space. It was nobody's fault, really. The spirit of separatism just kind of rose up and took over, and soon roughly 90 faculty members in the humanities were lobbying a professional consultant hired by the administration (after all, who has time anymore to talk directly to the people who work for you?) for bigger offices.

That means the "Humanities Quad," scheduled to open in the fall of 1996 or whenever Harvard can find a builder with the proper amount of minority workers, plywood and silver-capped teeth, will no longer be centered around the Freshman Union. In fact, the new complex will include Boylston Hall, which will only become accessible to the Union area when the University finally completes a proposed Sky Tram in 2001.

With the change, a host of names for the Quad have been suggested: Pillars, Complex, Center, Arc, Arch, Noah's Arc, Boylston and Hutch. I thought, given the new configuration, that Humanities Dodecahedron might work, and I made a call to someone in the math department this week to see if that would work spatially. They hung up, though.

Monday morning quarterbacks like English Department Chair Leo Damrosch now say the original vision for the unified Quad was "probably always a fantasy." But he seems pretty happy about the new arrangement--which will unify his physically divided department into space in the Freshman Union--presumably because it will increase the chances that his professors will be able to identify each other without the help of a facebook.

And that may be reason to sing from the mountain tops, or the top of Widener (but only if you've got those suction cups that allow you to scale the library's brick walls).

Kumbaya.