Housing Day and Harvard’s Liberal Paternalism

From the glut of t-shirts, face paint, and other strange totemic adornments on view during Housing Day in and around Harvard Yard, it’s safe to assume that most freshmen are at least sort of happy about the river gods’ decisions. However, I speak from experience in saying that much of their enthusiasm, though healthy and well-advised, is essentially forced: any given year, less than 10% are sorted into the house of their choice, a figure that makes your average state-school housing lottery look like an efficient allocator of preference.
This was not always the case. The underlying principle of Harvard’s system until 1997 was market competition—sometimes sordid, sometimes isolating, but always reasonably efficient.
Despite its attempts to correct for self-segregation and perceptions of exclusivity, the semi-random housing lottery we know today has no place for diversity of personal residential priorities and sensibilities. Two years ago, a conservative friend of mine enamored of the aesthetic of old Harvard beseeched the river gods to land him in Eliot, while a socialist friend turned on more by the egalitarian ethos of Harvard’s post-Georgian buildings dreamed of Mather. In a perfectly ordinary case of Housing Day randomness, the traditionalist opened his door to Mather’s postmodern gorilla of a mascot, the socialist to be banqueted and feted under a green clock tower for the remainder of freshman spring.
Although ghosts of this era of autonomous, culturally continuous houses are known to stir during fete and drag night seasons, the reasons Harvard freshman generally have for favoring one house or another are quite functional and easy to appreciate: one prefers convenience, another prefers spacious living quarters, another is mad about quality of community. In sum, Harvard’s kind fifteen-year-old attempt at social engineering has categorically failed, purging houses of their distinctive cultures while at the same time sending students to live exactly where they don’t want to—forcing open new chasms in quality of life between those who got what they wanted and those who did not.
Nonetheless, culture at Harvard was keen to adapt: Housing Day evolved as a focal point of the campus calendar, progressively adding on-the-Yard pep rallies, vuvuzelas, and night-before activities along the way. And so Harvard College’s first great tradition of the millennium was born: collective totemics galvanized identities chosen at random, while giving the dejected a sort of metaphysical reason to learn to “love the one you’re with.”
Within the last three years, the College administration has taken up an audacious fight against the very traditions its past paternalistic interventions forced into being. In a charming, hardly fatal activity redolent of a bygone era when Harvard still tolerated fun, freshmen descended to the river to launch paper boats in a burnt offering to the housing gods; brimming with house spirit and conviviality, upperclassmen in each house invited them to make memories over a moonlit drink or snack. As freshman in the spring of 2011, my blockmates and I were allowed to engage in River Run more or less unmolested; although the College had successfully put the kibosh on boat-burning, we were defiant and quick-footed enough to launch our idolatrous vessel while successfully evading the cops.
Fast-forward two years: in a move that I could hardly believe, this week’s Housing Day saw the administration post ID-checking guards at the entrances to each upperclassman house, turning away any and all members of the Class of 2016 with the threat of disciplinary action. An official Class of 2016 Housing Day t-shirt- (and likely cupcake-, mug-, and gingerbread-)decorating party was held from 9 to 11 in Annenberg instead, reflecting administrators’ strange belief that what students really want more of is supervised space for sober activities.
The rationale for University Hall’s policy isn’t all that foreign: technically speaking, Harvard campus has a zero-tolerance policy for freshman drinking, and something liability-worthy is just bound to happen when 1,600 alcohol-fueled freshmen are loosed on the river and quad. Although I would suggest it in the College’s interest to treat students like adults and expect adult behavior in turn, I cannot dismiss their concerns offhand. What I deplore is their counterproductive, insulting policy response: attempt to scare and physically deter freshmen into submission, while at the same time pedantically branding River Run a “fake tradition” (the irony being that Housing Day proper is no less newfangled).
Not only does this approach encourage dorm room vodka binges over well-paced beverage consumption and wall-scaling over ordinary swipe entry, but it also does violence to one of the few traditions left intact in a Harvard culture increasingly defined by administrative paternalism, social stratification, and pre-professional ambivalence toward community. For all that Harvard has been since 1636, undergraduates today have very little concept of the College as more than just an old Ivy League school where the Roosevelts and Kennedys went. In trampling Fair Harvard’s informal cultural treasures, University Hall must tread carefully—lest it succeed in cementing the College’s newfound reputation as the Ivy League’s UChicago: Where fun comes to die.