Whose Hall?

The Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub burst onto the scene last year as an equalizer in the Harvard social scene. Unfortunately, the pub has started the year with a senseless policy grounded in inequality.

We write of the pub’s Upper Hall program. When it began last year, Upper Hall allowed seniors willing to pay an up-front subscription fee (which manifests in the form of a mug) to drink up to three drinks a night every other Friday—and every Friday at the end of the year—at no cost. It was a successful idea that both popularized the pub and, more importantly, promoted camaraderie amongst the senior class.

Yet this year, the program was dramatically changed in ways that will inhibit senior class bonding. While last year a large swath of the senior class participated in Upper Hall, this year only 100 subscriptions were sold in addition to eight special mugs reserved for class marshals and 48 for House Committees to distribute at their discretion. To make bad go to worse, the mugs were sold on noon last Wednesday—smack in the middle of classes—with scant publicity.

Funding is understandably a constraint—the Upper Hall mugs sold for $50 for the year, but if one drank as much beer as possible (under Pub rules) they would be worth about $300. And the funding comes from an anonymous donor whose gift is presumably limited.

Nevertheless, this year’s distribution system was arbitrary and inequitable. Several alternatives are far superior. One option would involve a rotational system where all interested seniors would be assigned a few weeks of the year to participate in Upper Hall, rather than the same 100 seniors having a mug for the entire year. Another possibility would be opening Upper Hall only after spring break as a kind of pre-graduation send off—this was the case last year and seemed to work well. It effectively cuts the cost per mug and would dramatically increase the number of seniors who could be accommodated (presumably any senior who is interested). Either of these systems would have been far superior to what the pub actually did—although we prefer the first solution.

Finally, it is unfair to all seniors that the hall subscriptions were sold uneventfully in the middle of class time during shopping period. Both the lack of publicity and poor timing doubtlessly disenfranchised many seniors from the option of purchasing a subscription. A better way to handle the sale, given the limited number of mugs, would have been an online lottery in which all interested seniors could enter in order to receive the option of purchasing a mug.