​A Healthier Harvard

Physically speaking, Harvard is bad for you. The immense pressure, academic and otherwise, that comes with attending the College leads to not enough sleep, too much alcohol, and unhealthy eating, among other health hazards. It is for these reasons that the College must guide students on the path to physical well-being, in addition to focusing on sexual and mental health.

Last spring, the Freshman Class Committee held its third annual Freshman Health Week, which held events promoting different facets of health, including the mental, the sexual, and the physical. Perhaps due to a relatively new focus on destigmatization, groups and events promoting the former two are well-represented on campus.

Many organizations support all aspects of students’ sexual health on campus, from SHARC to PCC to Contact to Response. These groups address everything from contraception to sexual assault response to general sexual health, and their sex-positive resources and advice make the College better for all of us.

Mental health, while still stigmatized on campus, is thankfully becoming less so due to the efforts of groups like SMHL, which promotes mental wellness, ECHO, which counsels students about eating disorders, and Room 13, which offers nightly drop-in peer counseling. These resources help to combat the stress of being a Harvard student, to the direct benefit of those that access them, and to the indirect benefit of their peers.

So why, then, does Harvard have such a minimal focus on another vital facet of student health: physical well-being—meaning eating and sleeping well, drinking only in moderation, and exercising?

Even groups that do deal with physical health are more often perceived as addressing another facet of student health. Contraception, for instance, which can attempt to prevent sexually transmitted infections, is usually seen as an issue of sexual, not physical, health. Similarly, it seems that eating disorders are rightly seen as an issue of mental health, but rarely also as an issue of physical health, despite their physiological effects.

Perhaps in the effort to correct the historical stigma associated with sexual and mental health, it appears Harvard’s efforts to promote physical health have been severely wanting.

Harvard rarely promotes exercise beyond intramural sports, which, in practice, students are often in charge of promoting to their peers. Harvard Recreation rarely effectively promotes itself, and its presence on campus is rarely felt except by the students that go and seek it. It’s ironic that the College puts lots of effort into rewarding students who attend sporting events but little effort into rewarding physical activity itself, and this should be remedied.

The College’s dining halls offer plenty of healthy and unhealthy options. Past efforts to promote healthy eating in dining halls have had serious flaws, and much more must be done to ensure students receive the nutrition they need by finding effective, fair ways to encourage eating healthily.

Efforts by DAPA to counteract binge drinking are commendable, but they appear strongest during Opening Days of one’s freshman year, and, with a few exceptions, wane after that. Students are happy to take a DAPA survey for a free Camelbak when it is offered, but will also be happy to binge-drink the very next weekend. This culture is not only dangerous, it is unsustainably so, and Harvard must put more energy and resources into combating it. Harvard’s Amnesty Policy is a good start, but proactive efforts must increasingly complement retroactive ones. For instance, emulating Stanford’s so-called “open-door” policy, which encourages students to leave the door open when drinking to promote a safer culture, would be a strong first step.

Perhaps most jarringly, the College apparently puts little to no effort into promoting healthy sleep habits; seeing Lamont Library’s patrons during the wee hours drives home this sad point. Simply put, whatever can be done to combat the amount of sleep deprivation felt on this campus must be done— and that includes the College working to give its students a combination of reasonable workloads and good time-management skills.

Student health resources should not be in a zero-sum game. The College’s focus on maximizing student mental and sexual health should not come at the expense of giving students guidance and resources in the realm of physical health. If Harvard wants to truly prepare citizen-leaders for society, as its mission claims, it must make sure they are as healthy as they are well-educated.

Emmanuel D'Agostino '19, a Crimson editorial writer, is a prospective Integrative Biology concentrator living in Quincy House.