Home Is Where Your Class Is

Maybe misery just loves company. But when I realized on Housing Day that I was Quadded, I began to wonder: Why don’t all sophomores get Quadded? If the rumors are true, and Quad housing really has the cushiest single rooms, the nicest community, and the best dining halls, then why not? Moving sophomores to the quad would have benefits both for advising and class bonding—and would eliminate the shameful stigma of living a short bus away.

I’m not suggesting that we abolish the House system and the alleged community that it fosters. I’m just suggesting that we delay that process and build it on a more solid foundation of class cohesion. The new system would assign sophomore blocking groups to a house while they’re living in the quad—much like at Yale—allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the House system while entering it as a more prepared and bonded group.

Currently, Harvard freshmen are surrounded by other Harvard freshmen. We live together, eat together, play intramural sports together, and we even have our own seminars. In short, freshmen have a lot in common, and we feel solidarity with our class.

It’s clear that the administration thinks that a unique freshman experience is important—aside from providing a plethora of advising resources exclusively for freshman, the College has also turned freshman basements from student group space into freshmen TV rooms.

But just a few months later, all of this emphasis on class bonding disappears. As a sophomore, you’ve entered the pitiful no-man’s land of college life: no longer a shiny new freshman, but not a serious 30-page-paper-writing upperclassman either. Instead of transitional advising and further guidance through your college career, the College offers students a new identity—a house allegiance.

The current house system’s legitimacy as a community-builder is hard to swallow. After all, how can a random housing assignment result in the same feeling of connection that we’ve built with our class months before? It would make far more sense to have all sophomores living together in the Quad, reinforcing the class bond that is built on an actual similarity of experience, rather then forcing them into an arbitrary mélange of students.

With the river houses left for upperclassmen, and all sophomores sharing the presupposed burden of Quad housing, class bonding could continue beyond the sacred freshman year, and students would even feel a greater sense of overall college community.

Sophomores living in the Quad might curse their fate, but at least it would only last a year. And the advantages are hard to deny—aside from the intangible community benefits, sophomores would enjoy more focused advising, particularly now that concentration choice has been moved back a semester. Sophomore advising could be more dedicated to concentration-based inquiry and focus, without the pressure of the pre-professional focus their upperclassmen peers are driving towards. Advising staff could be specialized to deal with these types of issues, and to combat the sophomore slump, just as proctors are currently specifically assigned to freshmen.

As any Marxist will tell you, real solidarity can only exist within class groups: We have more in common with our class peers, with whom we will share the whole four year Harvard experience. It makes sense for the College’s housing to reflect that fact, instead of introducing unnecessary barriers to the groups and friendships we have formed freshman year.

Vanessa J. Dube ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.