The Most Needed Yard Renovation

In the winter of my freshman year, I may have inadvertently caused a fire in Weld Hall.

It was a snowy afternoon when I keyed into my dorm and noticed that four children behind me had slipped in. They sprinted up the stairs, and seconds before the fire alarm rang, I heard one of them shout “Don’t!” Outside, some people claimed they saw smoke while others reported that it was a false alarm. A pang of guilt lingered inside me as I watched firetrucks round the corner.

Ever since that day, my compunction has compelled me to reconsider our protective measures for dorms in the Yard. The fire was my fault, but I continued to wonder why the Yard, a tourist magnet and the campus nucleus, seems to contain the lowest levels of dorm entry security.

The first-year dorm security seems incongruous with the rest of Harvard’s campus, especially the Houses, where Securitas officers are a regular nightly sight at entrances. Even then, I’ve found that those security guards play a relatively passive role when it comes to preventing unwanted visitors from entering.

Indeed, there is a consistent history of crime in the Yard: Seemingly almost every year, it is plagued by a string of dorm room thefts. In response to these security breaches, the Harvard University Police Department seems to investigate the instances but rarely discover any culprits, and its responses tend to only emphasize how students can behave better.

In the past, efforts and suggestions were made by a College subcommittee on residential security in conjunction with the then-Undergraduate Council to enhance security on campus, but none seem to have made any substantial progress — as evidenced by the Yard’s persistent robberies and burglaries.

The issue of campus safety itself is intricate, given that improving preventive measures is not as linear as merely increasing the number of security guards. One thing we should never do is fully restrict the Yard to Harvard University ID members, essentially shutting out our neighbors and friends beyond Harvard’s gates. I do align, however, with the case for closing the Yard at night to all except ID holders at four remaining entrances, which promotes a safer campus without magnifying Harvard’s overall elitism and campus inaccessibility.

The solution to minimizing residential security breaches also lies outside the domain of policing. It would hardly be an overstatement to say that no one wants HUPD patrolling outside of their dorms, given privacy concerns and potential discomfort with the troubling history of racial profiling by college police.

For active responses to crime, we currently still rely on HUPD, which claims to be working on improving itself as part of the Reimagining Campus Community Safety initiative. Preventive measures for dorm safety, however, should come from a different source.

In 2017, an undergraduate on the College residential security subcommittee proposed installing security cameras in dorms and Houses. While I’m unsure whether a full suite of security cameras is necessary, adopting modern safety technology is the right path to securing the yard.

Recently, I visited some friends at neighboring colleges, and I realized how austere and old-fashioned the first-year dorms at Harvard are. To enter my friend’s dorm elsewhere, I had to sign a guest pass, then scan a QR code, then confirm my identity before the security doorman opened a side door for me to enter. Another one of the dorm entrances even had digital turnstiles, which may be too reminiscent of a subway system but seemed effective nonetheless for forbidding unwanted guests from sneaking in from behind.

At Harvard, we do have turnstiles in the Yard, but they serve to protect the books in Widener. We should wonder why it is much more difficult to enter Widener than it is to sneak into a freshman Harvard dorm. Do we value the safety of our books more than our students?

Perhaps all this fuss about residential safety is an overreaction, and the Yard is already just about as safe as we can make it. The 2022 HUPD annual security report indicated the lowest levels of crime in the past decade, despite Cambridge having the highest rate of crime in recent years. But amid the lowered crime rates, the consistently high incidence of break-ins demonstrate that the Yard still has issues with residential safety. When petty theft evolves to campus shootings and other serious crimes, it’ll be too late to start making changes then.

The Yard hasn’t been extensively renovated since 1994. Perhaps we can start by adding a turnstile to Weld.

Jeffrey B. Shi ’26, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Currier House.