Putting Fun in the Calendar

For a few weekends this semester, Loker Commons shed its geeky trappings and stepped into something a little more hip.

Traditionally seen as a place to grab Fly-By meals or frantically compare answers to Chem 15 problem sets, the underused space in the basement of Memorial Hall took on a different character for six weekend evenings as the College administration, Harvard Student Agencies, and Veritas Records ran their hugely successful Pub Nights.

Lured by $1 draft beers and live music from professional and student bands, thousands of students flocked to Loker in the name of school-sponsored fun, and its popularity as a nightspot has prompted a College plan to spend millions of dollars to convert Loker into a pub permanently.

The Pub Nights were one piece of a concerted administrative effort over the past several years to address on-campus social life, which has long been criticized by students as deficient.

Few students were surprised when, in late March, the Boston Globe reported results from the 2002 senior surveys showing that the graduating class was highly dissatisfied with social life at Harvard.

According to the survey, Harvard averaged a 2.62 for its campus social life, compared to an average rating of 2.89 at other schools, and netted a 2.53 for its sense of community, compared to 2.8 at other schools, the Globe reported.

The data added fuel to the long-held belief that students at Harvard have less fun than their peers, even those at similarly rigorous schools like Yale.

In part to address the evidence underlying this stereotype, the administration has taken on a role this year which it has largely ignored in the past—actively attempting to improve student social life, mainly by planning and funding large-scale, campus-wide events like concerts, festivals, and Pub Nights.

But even when these events are successful, students say they often don’t address the more basic need for casual socializing among undergraduates.

While large scale events sprinkled throughout the social calendar have added more options, the small parties that form the bread and butter of Harvard social life are still hindered by myriad restrictions.

And the middle ground, social staples at other schools like open fraternity parties or dive bars, is largely absent at Harvard.

Students cite the lack of well-established social options—and the highly fractured social scene that comes out of this deficiency—as responsible for student dissatisfaction and the long-held presumption that Harvard undergraduates here have less fun than their peers.

ADMINISTRATING FUN

The College has recently seen nearly unprecedented efforts on the part of the administration to jumpstart and facilitate social life on campus.

“That’s exactly what we’ve been focusing on for the past three years,” Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 wrote in an e-mail in March, referring to the low marks the Class of 2002 had given to campus social life in the survey.

Largely through its Student Activities Fund (SAF), a $25,000 trust controlled by the Office of the Dean, the College has funneled thousands of dollars towards funding big-name acts like Bob Dylan, Busta Rhymes, and comedian Jim Breuer.

Under then-Harvard Concert Commission (HCC) chair Justin H. Haan ’05, who is also a Crimson editor, the Undergraduate Council (UC) sponsored a free Busta Rhymes concert last spring that cost the administration and the UC $20,000 each.

This spring, the College shelled out over $10,000 for Springfest and its Afterparty. The Afterparty, a new addition to the annual spring fair, along with Pub Nights marked a continuing shift toward financially supporting events with alcohol, since both had beer for of-age attendees.

The administration also plans to make the fall Activities Fair more enticing and social by featuring student bands and barbecue fare.

And in October 2004, the College created a new position expressly to expand campus-wide social opportunities when it appointed Zachary A Corker ’04 as special assistant to the dean for social programming.

Corker, who has worked to coordinate events including the Harvard-Yale tailgate, two dodgeball tournaments, and Pub Nights, will stay on at the Office of Student Activities (OSA) next year to oversee Pub Nights and help plan Loker’s conversion.

“It speaks to how interested the Dean’s Office is in improving campus life,” Corker says of tentative plans to construct a permanent pub.

Buoyed by Corker’s success this year, the College has made his role as “fun czar” a more permanent fixture in University Hall, with Haan filling the post next year.

“My department is right now the fastest growing one in the College, with the addition of two full-time staff members—Justin and Zac—for the next academic year,” Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd writes of the OSA in an e-mail.

The unprecedented administrative focus on social life this year has yielded a range of new events and an expanding staff to facilitate them. But these efforts, while well-intentioned, may be misdirected, both in the less-than-stellar success of many of the initiatives and in the continuing inattention to limitations on informal student-organized social activities.

PARTY PLANNING

The balance between supporting social life and actually creating it has proved difficult to achieve.

Many, including students and Corker, believe that the onus is on students to improve campus options for socializing.

“Social life is in the province of students,” Corker says. “We need to empower them more to get what they want.”

HCC Chair Jack P. McCambridge ’06 also says that students should ultimately be planning the events.

“Harvard’s philosophy is that there’s no reason why they should be creating these events,” he says. “More importantly, I don’t think they would be very popular if there are 30-to-35-year-old people creating opportunities for students.”

But McCambridge adds that having staff unencumbered by classwork dedicated to supporting the student planners does help.

“I admire the UC, Veritas, and the concert commission trying to supplement [student social life], but ultimately, I think it’s unrealistic to expect students to fill the role of full-time staff members,” he says.

Catherine C. Chang ’07, a member of the newly-formed Pub Nights Commission, agrees that the administration should play a specific, but limited, role.

“You don’t always want activities sponsored by the Dean necessarily, because if students want a better social life then they have to be the ones to take initiative and improve it,” Chang says. “The administration can provide the leeway and resources necessary to do it.”

The recent conflicted identity of Springfest perhaps best exemplifies the problems inherent in too much administrative involvement in social activities.

Originally conceived in 1994 as a springtime counterpart to Harvard-Yale weekend where undergraduates would put aside work to listen to music and hang out with friends, the event suffered from mediocre attendance and was in 2002 offered a life line in the form of thousands of dollars from the President’s Office.

But along with the money came evolving, and sometimes contradictory, ideas about the goals of the event, ultimately forcing it to lose its initial focus on undergraduates as it was expanded to include Harvard faculty, staff, and their families.

“Springfest has become the president’s little Kiddie Carnival, which is unfortunate,” Lowell House Committee (HoCo) Co-Chair Neil K. Mehta ’06 says. “If you think of [Brown and Dartmouth] everyone has something big that they look forward to. In the meantime, the big spring event is Springfest where everyone is usually disappointed about the lack of a raucous all-out party weekend that people really want and really need.”

DIFFERENT BRANDS OF FUN

But so far, the events sponsored by the administration seem to have focused on a niche independent from the heart of Harvard social life, which is mostly composed of smaller-scale events, from dorm room shindigs to final club gatherings to sweaty grindfests in the Currier Ten-Man suite. While not all students gravitate toward these parties, which often include alcohol, most undergraduates see these as the predominant option.

These more standard choices have not been the focal point of administrative concern, but it is unclear whether the events that are being expanded, like concerts and festivals, can compensate for a deficient day-to-day social scene.

“I think there’s a legitimate problem­ if it’s 11:30 on a Friday night, and you’re not 21 and you don’t want to be in a room party, there’s nothing for you to do,” says Tessa C. Petrich ’07, who sits on the Pub Night Commission.

Across the Ivy League, Harvard’s reliance on constrained dorm-centered social events seems to be unique.

Cornell’s Slope Day, when students celebrate the end of classes with a day of drinking and revelry, and Dartmouth’s Green Key weekend, a similarly debaucherous few days, are each one piece of a social fabric composed of large, open fraternity parties every night of every weekend.

Harvard does not recognize fraternities or sororities because its rules governing discrimination currently prohibit groups that only allow members of one sex. This means that Greek groups and others like them are barred from using everything from school money to meeting space to bulletin boards, seriously compromising their ability to be a strong presence on campus.

“Harvard’s policy of not recognizing single-sex social organizations stems from the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe and the desire of the College to protect women from discrimination in joining previously all-male organizations,” Kidd writes in an e-mail. “Although the Committee on College Life sub-committee on Harvard student organizations looked into this topic during the year, no decision to change the policy was reached.”

Without the reliable standbys of frat row or cheap bars, the relatively meager social offerings on campus splinter even further, decentralizing the undergraduate community as students scatter in search of the perfect party, or really, any party at all. “Harvard is built much more upon [students] finding their own niches,” Aditya H. Sanghvi ’06 says.

Largely confined to common rooms, undergraduates must also answer to College regulations, which prohibit parties on 15 weekend nights a year, including the nights before LSATs and those during reading and exam period.

“It’s been a policy developed by individual Houses,” Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman ’67 says of the rules. “When Houses are aware that there are important dates, they try to avoid those in order to see that our students feel supported.”

Parties must also end by 2 a.m. on weekends, though students say this is an improvement over the previous deadline of 1 a.m. The Dean’s Office agreed to extend party hours in undergraduate common rooms last year, and this year the office encouraged the City of Cambridge to extend party hours in House common spaces like dining halls until 2 a.m. as well.

D. Brendan Moore ’07 saw the effect of these often obscure regulations this April, when he was forced to cancel a long-planned shindig after finding out at the last minute that parties were prohibited that day because of MCATs.

And with the planned location, Currier’s Tuchman Living Room, booked solid through the end of the year, Moore eventually had to postpone the party until September.

Rules also bar freshmen from hosting parties in their dorms, prompting the characteristic mass weekend exodus to the Quad in search of alternatives.

“Freshmen are somewhat characterized on a weekend traveling in packs, looking for a party,” Undergraduate Council Student Activities Committee Chair Aaron D. Chadbourne ’06 says.

At Harvard, freshman entryway proctors, typically graduate students far older than their charges, double as disciplinarians and mentors.

But at schools like Yale, Dartmouth, and Cornell, undergraduates usually fill the role of residential adviser, a difference that invariably lends itself to a laxer attitude towards drinking and a less paternalistic attitude than the one that can permeate first-year life at Harvard.

While Yale and Harvard have similar policies prohibiting alcohol in freshman dorms, even for those of age, the enforcement of these rules varies greatly between the two schools.

“Freshman dorms are definitely still full of crackdown mentality,” former Lowell HoCo chair Todd van Stolk-Riley ’06 says.

Jordan B. Weitzen ’08 says that he too saw an atmosphere of enforcement from proctors in Yard halls.

“I feel that proctors go out of their way to look for underage drinking in freshman dorms,” Weitzen writes in an e-mail. “It is almost like the proctors are paranoid about having alcohol show up in their entry way.”

But in recent interviews, undergraduates at Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth characterized the role of the residential adviser, or its equivalent, as one who acts more as an adviser than an enforcer.

“I am not a policeman—I’m here to help them adjust to this strange environment, that’s what I try to do,” says Nicholas W. Evans, a member of Yale’s Class of 2005 and a freshman counselor.

And at Yale, freshmen are not bound by the regulations that force first-years out of the Yard on a Friday night. “My freshman year, my suite hosted two parties that had probably 200 or 300 people visit over the course of the night,” Yale senior Karl B. Gunderson writes in an e-mail.

SPACE RACE

The restrictions on dorm room parties are compounded by the lack of social space available outside of the House system.

“There are very few spaces on campus where you can throw a large-scale party,” Chadbourne says. “Dartmouth has frat row, where hundreds of people are showing up at these parties.”

With as many as 1,000 students at a time venturing to Loker to take in live music, grab a $1 draft beer, or socialize with friends, the popularity of Pub Nights speaks to the larger student need for community space.

“It creates a space open to the entire Harvard community, which is the most powerful thing about Pub Nights,” Haan says.

Pub Nights are one venue where undergraduates can go expecting to see acquaintances from across the College, but Petrich emphasizes that they are not enough.

“Pub Nights are a step in the right direction in that you can be 18, you can go and dance to the music...but [they] should not be the only option,” Petrich says.

The need for large, casual social events is served at many other peer institutions by the presence of frat row, where students can expect to show up any weekend night and mingle with a critical mass of their peers.

Even if frats were recognized at Harvard, high Square real estate prices would diminish their ability to purchase space and act as a strong social presence on campus. Sigma Chi, however, was able to purchase a house on Mass. Ave last year, indicating the potential for Greek life.

While fraternities are not completely open, in practice they seem to cater to a far broader swath of the undergraduate community at schools like Cornell and Dartmouth than final clubs do at Harvard.

“Very rarely, if ever, when you show up at an on- or off-campus location will you see somebody holding a list at the door or turning people away,” says 2005 Yale graduate Brian P. Goldman, who is a member of Sigma Pi Epsilon.

Rooted in tradition, fraternities offer free-flowing beer and a consistent social option on other campuses.

Thirty percent of Cornell undergraduates go Greek, while just under half of Dartmouth students are in a fraternity or sorority.

“At Dartmouth, there’s this common perception that the social life revolves around the Greek system, particularly fraternities, and I would say that’s pretty accurate,” Dartmouth junior Amanda M. Morris says.

And most students say that the frat houses are the single most popular social option on campus.

“There’s an incredibly strong presence of the Greek system,” says Mark P. Coombs, a freshman at Cornell.

Even at Yale, where fraternities constitute a smaller percentage of the student body­—roughly 20 percent—they are still a popular venue for socializing.

“They by no means have a monopoly on social life at Yale,” says Alistair F. Anagnostou, a member of the Yale Class of 2005. “Frats are at least consistent—if you want to find a party on a Saturday night, there’s going to be one.”

“[Fraternities] play a big role in welcoming students to Yale. They’re there for people who are interested in going to parties,” adds Goldman.

Compared with the student scene on other campuses, Sanghvi hesitates to decry the experience at Harvard—but he says social life here is unique. He says that at other schools students have more consistent and accessible choices.

“It’s kind of natural for people to go to these places because they always know what social options are available—they don’t need to search,” Sanghvi says of options like fraternity bashes. “The parties are constructed on a regular basis.”

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.