Charge of the Night Brigade

Harvard was made for the morning person. Just look at class times. Many students must race out of bed to classes that meet before Regis and Kathie Lee hit the airwaves. Look at finals. Even if you carefully select a noon lecture, the sunrise lovers in the registrar's office may schedule the exam for that awful hour of 9:15 a.m.

But not all Harvard students are morning people. It would be silly to expect 6,000 people to keep the same hours under any circumstances, short of the army; throw in different academic schedules, different extracurricular activities and different study habits, and you have a diversity of sleep cycles that would make the admissions office proud. At 2:30 a.m. on any weeknight, there are Harvard students in the University Lutheran Church, overseeing the homeless shelter, at The Crimson putting the finishing touches on the next day's paper, in the Grays basement staffing Room 13, in the Science Center computer labs perfecting programs and, from Mather to Pforzheimer, in their rooms cranking out essays under the glare of a halogen lamp.

Unfortunately, the administration refuses to recognize this reality. By insisting on an inflexible, boarding-school-esque meal plan, and by refusing to provide warm and quiet late-night study spaces, Harvard gives night people short shrift.

First, our supposedly complete meal plan is heavily biased toward early-risers. If all of us must pay for the food, regardless of what is served, it should at least be available at times when we need to eat.

This semester, my first class is at 11:30 a.m. two days a week. So I skip breakfast, and have lunch at 2 p.m. By the time I get to Lamont for some afternoon reading, the sunlight has begun to fade and the dinner hours are fast ticking away. Even if I don't eat again until 7--when only the ends of the pork loin are left and the chocolate chip cookies are long gone--just four-and-a-half hours have elapsed since I finished lunch.

Now, perhaps this would be all right if I were to eat a small dinner and then another small meal four hours later. But no! Although I will be awake for hours after I leave dinner, Harvard stops providing me food at 7:15 p.m. When you get up at 10 a.m. and go to sleep at 3 a.m., that's just about right in the middle of the day--no time for a last meal.

Of course, I don't simply stop eating at 7:15. You can often find me with hundreds of my fellow hungry Harvard students at Tommy's, the Leverett Grille or Store 24. Yet while it's nice to keep the businesses in the Square healthy, I'm more concerned about the health of my bank account and of my body. A money-saving compromise is the heist of apples and other pieces of fruit from the dining halls, an act that has become a nightly ritual for many of us.

Now, surely, fruit is not so bad, you say? Healthy and easily-digestible? Try putting yourself in my stomach's position. For the first nine hours of the day, you are fed a fat-filled set of deposits which might include clam chowder, a steak bomb, chicken wings, french fries, turkey meatloaf, broccoli souffle, Rice Krispies treats and ice cream. Then, for the next eight hours, you are fed several bananas and lots of apples: green apples, red apples and yellow apples, spotted and solid apples, Red Delicious and Macintosh. Sometimes you are forced to digest six apples in an evening. You would revolt too.

At least my stomach is not alone in being mad at 12:30 a.m.; as I am kicked out of the library, my mind joins in the anti-Harvard rage. And who wouldn't be irked? It's as if an evil, faceless Harvard administrator is waving to us as we leave Lamont, saying, "Ha ha ha! You' didn't get your work done, did you? Wel,l too bad! It's time to go! You're a night person. I hate night people. You should be asleep by now! Asleep! Now I'm going to lock you out of a warm, quiet place to study, so you can go back to your underheated cubicle and struggle with your noisy roommates who will do everything in their power to keep you from reading. Be gone!"

At college, libraries are more than places to check out books or do research; they are essential extensions of our study space. Unlike the "real world," we're not able to work as late as we choose in our homes, with the lights, heat and radio on, maintaining ideal study conditions even in the dead of night. In our dorm rooms, even if no one's talking, trying to read with pillows temptingly few inches away is not easy. Worse still, Harvard's heating authorities, who presumably retire to their own warm bedrooms each evening, have insanely decreed that room temperatures migrate down to 64 degrees overnight. It's not easy to study under three blankets.

The fact that Harvard is kinder to students who go to sleep by midnight seems out of step with its student body--or, more accurately, with their bodies. For not only do we often have classes and extracurriculars that dictate a later schedule; we may be naturally inclined to sleep later in the mornings and stay up later in the evenings.

Don't take the word of a narcoleptic Social Studies concentrator. Recent studies have concluded that schools across the country are forcing young people to conform to biologically unsuitable timetables. According to the New York Times, many of the nation's top sleep researchers agree that most teenagers are more naturally inclined to sleep from 2 a.m. to noon than from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. "What is happening to their biology may be preventing them and working against them going to bed earlier," Brown Professor Mary A. Carskadon told the Times. Teenagers, she added, are more likely to "feel better and perform activities later in the day and into the night, and feel worse doing things early in the morning."

Surely Harvard is not the only university in the nation to cater to the breakfast-eaters, but it may be the least accommodating to those of us who keep later hours. It's time for Harvard students of the night to stand up and demand some compromise. Short of scrapping the paternalistic, 19th-century meal plan altogether or creating a "midnight meal" option, one step in the right direction would be staggering hours among the 13 dining halls.

For example, Quincy might continue to serve dinner from 5 p.m. to 7:15, while Leverett's hours could be shifted to 6:15 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The throngs of students who eat between 6:15 p.m. and 7 p.m. would be accommodated in both houses, and many people would be able to eat at a more convenient and more natural time. Another option would be compensating our Board Plus accounts for missed meals in the dining halls.

It would be even easier for Harvard to remedy the late-night studying problem: keep Cabot or Lamont open later every night of the week. We don't need to check out books, or to search Hollis. We don't even need 24-hour service. We only need a quiet, heated, comfortable place to do what we are above all here to do: study. Keeping just one of Harvard's 90 libraries open until 3 a.m. is not an unreasonable request of a university so committed to learning.

So take this as a wake-up call, Harvard. As long as hundreds of us are still hungry hours after Domna is in bed, and as long as hundreds of us are still reading long after Lamont has gone dark, you're not fulfilling your mission to provide an environment supportive of learning and healthy living.