You’re Kindly Invited...

On the surface, it’s a brilliant idea. One of the many civilized and enlightened customs of this university. And who is not seduced by the perfectly pressed tablecloths, the sparkling glasses and plates, each set with care, the silverware correctly arranged? On a board to the side shine bottles of red and white wine. The atmosphere is festive, the dining hall we know as a humble, daily stage of our lives is transformed. Really, the effort that Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) puts into each semester’s student-faculty dinner is quite unbelievable. And it pays off, too: the spectacle of young men and women in their nice clothes politely dining with gray-haired professors is truly enjoyable to behold. The evening is one of those rituals which make us all feel that, for a moment, we are participating in some custom of yore.

Yet, despite this harmonious appearance, the student-faculty dinner is a symptom of something troubling. The very reason we enjoy the meal, its exceptionality, is the very problem at the heart of the whole event. By holding these dinners, our House Masters and dining hall managers imply that, as a condition for professors to join students for a meal in the dining hall, there needs to be special attire, special food and drink.

And they are right: the dinner is exceptional not only because of the HUDS effort, but simply because faculty members are normally absent from our dining halls. Apart from the advising nights when representatives of each concentration descend upon dining halls to promote their fields, there rarely is reason to see a faculty member eat with students. It would be fascinating to discover how much professors who more recently arrived at Harvard know about the Houses: do they know their locations? Do they know that Dunster is not just a street, and Eliot not just a former University president?

Everyone is inclined to lament that outside of the classroom, faculty-student contact is relatively rare, but no one seems to expect otherwise. We interact with faculty members regularly in formal circumstances such as seminars and office hours; a small number of individual students enjoy one-on-one contact as research aides or thesis advisees. But apart from receptions at conferences or panels, there are no other occasions to interact in a more relaxed setting with our professors.

“There has definitely been a kind of progressive process of disappearance of the professors from the Houses,” says Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Eliot House Master Lino Pertile. “An ethos of community of interests uniting students and faculty has gone missing.” Eating with students is the last thought on the mind of professors, who are already busy juggling their careers and families, and who mostly do not live near the campus, but in Lexington, Concord, etc.

It’s good to remember that the reason our Houses are not just dormitories is that they started out life as quite distinct entities. Modeled on English colleges, they featured professors who resided within the colleges and dined in the dining halls. Pertile points out that “the ancient model of professor… was single and dedicated almost entirely to the College and its students. He is very rare, almost non-existent [now].” Of course, with changes in professorial life (and especially in the expectations that weigh upon them: more research, less teaching), the Houses have gradually lost the traces of faculty presence—remaining only in the rudiment of resident tutors, who of course are not professors but students themselves. The Senior Common Rooms, receptions to which professors affiliated with a House are invited, do remarkably little to stimulate student-faculty interaction, and the institutional relationship between faculty members and the Houses is tenuous: faculty members are not seen in the Houses at all.

We have come to a point where students themselves perceive the houses as utterly non-academic environments. For most of us, the Houses are where we relax, far from the stresses of the lecture hall and library. The physical separation from where our classes take place marks a switch of pace in everyone’s life. The dining hall is perhaps the prime space for daily social interaction among students, and social interaction does not always resemble the intellectual intercourse fostered in more academic settings.

Most of us do not complain because we do not really know otherwise. But professors should better realize the importance of our loss at not knowing them other than within the very compartmentalized and professionalized classroom exchange of ideas. No one need move from Lexington to Leverett House, but a little more mingling with students in the dining halls should really be part of every professor’s job description.

Ideally, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would ban teaching in one of the lunchtime hours, so no class could be scheduled then. Instead, faculty would spend time with students. There’s plenty each professor can do before that distant day comes: to start, make it a priority to eat lunch once a week in a House. There is a reason Harvard has “Houses” and not “dormitories.” If professors start breaking the odd distance that currently subsists between them and their students, it will be a tiny step towards a university more based on human exchanges. We students have a lot to offer, and are only here for a few years before rushing off to very different climes. Here’s hoping you join us in the dining halls. Not just when we uncork the wine for you, but regularly.

Alexander Bevilacqua ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is an history and literature concentrator in Leverett House.