Earth To Hilles

It’s the one thing that the Harvard College Democrats and the Harvard Republican Club seem to agree on: Neither uses, nor wants to use, their new office in the Student Organization Center, better known as the top floors of the Quad’s Hilles library. Whether you call Hilles a failure or a success waiting to happen, there is one clear lesson that the administration must take away from it: For students at Harvard, location matters more than anything else.

Despite being home to numerous student group offices and a penthouse coffee bar, one term after an extensive renovation and the opening of the Student Organization Center in Hilles feels as chilly as an abandoned warehouse. It has been said that only half of the International Relations Council has ever seen their Hilles-based office. And a significant subset of the Harvard population probably can’t distinguish between Hilles, HOLLIS, and Hillel. One need only walk the halls of Hilles’ upper floors to see that they are, indeed, desolate, and the café is anything but brewing with the social bustle of its faraway cousin in Lamont.

Assistant Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin II offers an explanation: Hilles just needs a few years to bloom to its full potential. But why is it that the Women’s Center in the Yard, which opened at the same time, is already seeing substantial student use, while Hilles’ ingratiating calls of "free coffee and copying" hold no allure? The answer, of course, is location.

Proximity is of such fundamental importance at Harvard that student groups will prefer working out of Yard and river dorm rooms irrespective of the quality of facilities at the Quad. Not even a Quad chateau could mitigate the horrors of a ten-minute trek on a cold winter day with inconvenient shuttle times. And to think it has been a warm winter. What happens when we get a blizzard?

That’s not to say we are ungrateful that the College has made a genuine effort to improve the undergrad experience. The renovations of Yard basements into freshman social spaces—which, like Hilles, mostly go unused—as well as of Hilles itself, are impressive aesthetic and functional achievements when considered in their own right. We imagine that the long-under-construction pub in Loker Commons will be just as remarkable. Yet the reason many of these renovations may not be immediate blockbusters is that their functional improvements do not necessarily coincide with current student preferences, although predicting student response to any campus life initiative is an understandably difficult administrative task.

Perhaps Hilles is an unsuccessful experiment, but all is not lost. Within a reasonable number of years, the undergrad facilities and residential housing at the Quad will be transferred to Allston, and graduate students will be Linnaean Street’s new denizens. Administrators have another chance, and should bear the lessons of Hilles in mind when planning their vision for undergrad life in the future: They should avoid the mistake of disregarding Allston’s similarly remote location.

In the meantime, we, as students, should try to make the most of what we have. The College should consider beefing up the Quad shuttles to encourage Hilles use—why does Quad-Mather shuttle only run at night? It can also continue the free food and coffee promotions it has begun. And, of course, in May the College can make the most of the GPS technology it is installing on shuttles. At the very least, we would take a trip to Hilles to see if the real-time maps actually work.