So You Got Quadded?

For some, my housing day would have been a nightmare. But unlike the typical freshman, I was thrilled to get quadded.

To my newest neighbors: Though Riverites will tell you that Quad pride is delusion, Stockholm syndrome, or rationalization, it isn’t. Even though you’ll be pitied and pooh-poohed by those placed into houses admittedly flashier and more recently renovated, stay the course.

It’s reasonable to long for Adams House’s newly renovated sheen or Lowell House’s devastatingly beautiful courtyards. But the Quad’s apparent weakness is actually its strength — it’s an idyll away from the optimization, workaholism, and Harvard omnipresence that pervade our student culture.

These ills were embodied in my freshman-year dorm. From Weld Hall’s third floor, my bedroom looked onto Widener Library from one window, and onto Memorial Church from the other. Though the view was stunning, waking up to Work on one side and God on the other filled me with that Puritan anxiety all too common to the Yard. And any freshman-year hopes of a reasonable work-life balance were further dimmed by the convenience of Lamont which, though I love it deeply, was certainly not conducive to a healthy circadian rhythm.

Arriving to an extravagant welcome in Pforzheimer House, I worked hard to see the pros. Secluded in the practically pastoral embrace of residential Cambridge, Pfoho is an escape from the mania of the Yard. The daily commute is a recentering reminder that, even though it can feel like it, a world does indeed exist outside of the Harvard bubble.

As much as it’s fun to extol the virtues of the Quad, however, doing so misses the point. The real issue isn’t that the Quad is far, but that our student experience is so consumerized that the longer-than-average “qualk” home becomes a grievous, quasi-moral wrong.

Recent abominable op-eds disparaging the quad over its distance only demonstrate this cultural obsession with even this slightest of burdens. The terror of losing approximately 20 minutes of otherwise-free time from your day is a manifestation of the same time scarcity mindset which leads Harvard students to limit social engagements, rule out spontaneous side quests, and dread the idea of a twice-daily walk through an otherwise scenic neighborhood.

But there are lessons to be learned about separation in the Quad’s history. Indeed, its buildings used to make up Radcliffe, the women’s college which Harvard eventually merged with to become co-ed, and served a welcoming home for minority students during the days when some other houses were still functionally elite social clubs. To be apart from Harvard — and yet also very much a part of it — is thus the Quad’s whole appeal.

Of course, Quad life isn’t for everyone — but it needn’t be. Those who value spontaneity with friends — or more realistically, those who habitually sleep in — are welcome to complain about the distance. Transfer applications should be available to those who want them. But Harvard students would do well to recognize the Quad’s merits — and to inquire why a generally equal experience is so despised by those on the River.

Until then, I’ll happily eat my cold breakfast while I qualk to class.

Jack P. Flanigan, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.