Harvard, Turn Down the Heat

I hate hot temperatures, especially in my dorm room. Ideally, my thermostat would always be set to mid-high 60s, and in my free time, you can catch me skating with Harvard’s figure skating club. However, my plea to make Harvard’s dorms less sweltering is all but selfish.

It is high time that Harvard treats New England’s historically hot summers as what they are — a threat to public health.

As all undergraduates know, the first few weeks of the fall semester at the College bring unbearably hot dorms. Yet a number of affiliates find themselves living in undergraduate housing throughout summer’s peak. In fact, many high schoolers occupy Harvard’s dorms to participate in its summer school program. In the midst of adjusting to their new environment and completing their program requirements, these students are subjected to the intensity of a Cambridge summer.

In a class I took for my Energy and Environment secondary, a classmate once recalled fainting in Straus Hall from heat exhaustion while working as a summer school proctor. Last summer, The Crimson reported that affiliates experienced serious discomfort in non-air-conditioned dorms as a result of a heatwave last June. The summer of 2022 also brought a similar wave of extreme heat on campus.

If college students can’t handle the heat of a Harvard summer, how can we expect younger adolescents to be able to tolerate it? Harvard’s failure to adapt more of its dorms to include cooling functions not only endangers affiliates, but also prospective college students, their families, and tourists at Harvard during the summer months.

According to the World Health Organization, heat stress is the number one cause of weather-related death internationally. While young adults are usually less vulnerable to such impacts, we’re not exempt from a fatal outcome. For one, heavy alcohol consumption and use of some common antidepressants or anti-allergy medications can make a person more susceptible to heat-related illness. Naturally, these are fairly common items in a university environment year-round.

Intense humidity, characteristic of New England summers, exacerbates the situation. And, if you’ve experienced both, you know that humid heat is worse than dry heat. This is due to the “wet bulb” effect, which hampers the ability of humans to naturally regulate temperature through sweating.

Put simply, if hot air is too humid, it cannot absorb as much moisture. Sweat then sticks to the body with no reprieve thus halting the process of internal temperature regulation.

As the climate crisis worsens, more and more of us will be susceptible to heat stress-related incidents. Perhaps you have already experienced one in Cambridge or elsewhere — I have twice.

Harvard hosting cool-down events and having air conditioning in more centralized spaces on campus was a start. It is even better that disability-accommodated dorms can be equipped with air conditioning. However, our administration should go further — Harvard should more readily inform students about ways to avoid heat stroke during fall move-in and should make a greater effort to distribute electric and portable fans to affiliates, free of charge.

Then comes the long-term solution: Making sure a larger share of dorm rooms possess AC or less heat-trapping insulation.

Sure, there is the well-founded argument that the expansion of AC to all of Harvard’s dorms would lead to more fossil fuel combustion — this is true. However, the climate transition requires adapting our existing infrastructure to ensure our survival through extreme weather. Furthermore, around half of Massachusetts’s electricity is generated from renewable sources — as time progresses, this percentage will likely increase. Therefore, Harvard’s improved cooling systems would likely contribute to less greenhouse gases as time progresses.

Harvard’s transition away from hyper-sweltering indoor environments will not only give me one less thing to complain about but also tackle a far more important problem — protecting the health of our community.

So, to Harvard I say: It's time to turn down the heat.

Jasmine N. Wynn ’27, an Associate Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Winthrop House