Harvard College Orders Student Groups to Move Out of SOCH, Downsize Storage

Student organizations on the third floor of the Student Organization Center at Hilles must move out of their current offices and downsize into roughly 25 square feet of storage space as the College repurposes the floor for administrative use, according to emails sent to student leaders on Wednesday and Thursday.

The emails — sent by the Dean of Students Office just days before the third floor is set to be cleared on Monday — were the first time organizations received specific dimensions for their new spaces. Groups were told to sort their belongings by Sunday, leaving items they want to keep in their current offices and moving unwanted materials to designated disposal areas. Anything not clearly labeled by the deadline risks being discarded, the emails said.

“It is critical to understand that any items that do not fit within the 5 ft x 5 ft space will be discarded,” JonRobert Bagley, the associate director of student organizations and resources, wrote in the email. “Failure to take action before the April 12 may result in the loss of your organization’s belongings.”

The move follows a February directive from Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne ordering all organizations on the third floor to vacate their offices by the end of the term. The relocation is part of a Faculty of Arts and Sciences effort to cut costs amid a $365 million structural budget deficit, and the vacated offices are being repurposed for College administrative use.

Roughly 50 organizations use the third-floor space, including the Harvard China Forum, City Step, Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and Harvard Women in Business.

Several student leaders said they were caught off guard by the size of the new spaces.

“This is kind of definitely a shock,” said Moeen M. Razzaque ’26, co-president of the Pakistani Student Association and the Harvard Islamic Society. “Before the email that we just got, there was no 5-foot-by-5-foot expectation.”

The groups knew their new storage would be smaller, but had not anticipated a reduction of this magnitude, Razzaque said. He pointed to the PSA and HIS’s annual Ramadan programming — iftars for 100 to 150 people that require tray holders, food warmers, and other large-scale equipment — as the kind of inventory that cannot fit in the allotted space.

“To have the tray holders, to have the food warmers, to have all the equipment necessary for making that happen — that takes up a good amount of space,” he said.

Communication around the move has been inconsistent, several student leaders said. Katherine M. Benkelman ’28, treasurer of Sexual Education by Harvard College Students, said two SOCH associates told SEHCS it would have no storage at all next year, but a third said it would. The organization only learned its storage situation definitively from the Thursday email.

“It’s definitely been tough and stressful not having all the information,” Benkelman said.

The downsizing will also force SEHCS to donate roughly half of its current inventory, including menstrual products and condoms — supplies Benkelman said amount to a multi-year stock the group will need to replace through future donations.

“We’ll have to ask for more donations in the future, even though we have a couple years supply right now that we have to get rid of,” she said.

Richael Saka ’27, co-president of Harvard Undergraduate Women in Computer Science, called the administrative communication around the move “pretty disingenuous.”

“They framed it as, ‘Oh, you will have another space in the SOCH to be able to store stuff,’” Saka said. “And then, weeks later, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re giving you this shoe box of a closet to store your stuff from the past five years.’”

Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote that while the College could not comment on specific student experiences, administrators “have been providing consistent, transparent, and timely communications to students about the ongoing transition of space at Hilles.”

Not all organizations were as frustrated. Kendall M. Cooper ’27, a co-president of Harvard Women in Business, said communication from the DSO had been “fairly consistent and transparent.” Cooper said she expected the new space to be roughly half the size of the group’s current office and called the process a useful exercise in decluttering.

“It was kind of nice,” Cooper said. “It allowed us to kind of get a little bit clearer about what we wanted to keep and what we really didn’t need as a club.”

Other students framed the move as part of a broader pattern. Saka argued the SOCH relocation highlights the College’s tendency to sideline student spaces for its own needs.

“They could be using their money to build more office spaces rather than pushing out students from that space,” she said. “The SOCH is supposed to be a student space, and it just seems very cheap of the administration.”

—Staff writer Alma T. Barak can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at almabk.54. Follow her on X @almabk_.

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.