Love It: Community Dinner

“Ideally, each House should feel like a semi-autonomous community within Harvard. They should truly be houses—places where students feel at home, forming close bonds with House masters, staff, and each other. ”—“Let Them Eat Where They Please,” The Harvard Crimson.

It’s always refreshing to pick up a Crimson editorial and instead find yourself reading a brochure for Harvard; it reminds you what an idyllic place you thought your house would be. You believed you’d sit down with strangers and jump straight into metaphysics or social justice. That opening rush would be followed by a series of chance encounters over chickwiches, the happenstance odd meals that led to you being best of friends. Then you got in on Housing Day, grew up, and realized that sophomore year means a schedule of rotating lunch dates, dinners with blockmates, sprints through Fly-By, and work-meals where you hope you’ll be left alone in the back of the dining hall.

How often do you eat an unscheduled dinner without texting anyone before and end up eating with a housemate you want to know better? What about sitting with five, ten housemates, a couple of whom you’ve never met before? Chances are they also live in San Francisco or read Jacques Derrida or sneak off to bikram yoga in the Square or have something else in common with you—like maybe the tiny, tiny College you both attend.

Hate the once-a-week infringement on your complete autonomy all you want, but Community Dinner is a way to bring those moments back to life. Community doesn’t arise naturally; it takes active steps to build—though in most places those steps can be ground-up or top-down.

Thinking along the “ground-up” lines, the piece calls for “House and Masters and Tutors [to] take an active role in encouraging intra-House bonding,” which is hilarious, since that’s all they spend their time doing. Harvard students, like tired mules, are besieged by ‘active-role’ carrots—or rather monkey-bread teas. Our administration desperately begs us to invest in House community, but we grab the food and ridicule the formals.

The fact is, carrots don’t motivate Harvard students. In our consumer-based, opportunity-overwhelmed collegiate system, we’re assaulted by these orange roots: Supreme Court justices stopping by to speak, parties everywhere all the time, guaranteed future employment if we just attend that extra OCS event. Adding an extra carrot won’t bring a house together, but maybe some “bureaucratic dicta” can. Maybe these adults know something that us excellent sheep are missing, something about the idea that certain rules and boundaries force us into uncomfortable and productive situations. That you might have to reschedule another catch-up or team-dinner, but that you might meet someone incredible—or even someone terrible who becomes your permanent cocktail anecdote.

And if you really hate community, just sneak in, sit down, and stop the snark. It’s really not too hard.