Reminiscing at Barker

Have you ever changed your mind and felt funny about it? Of course, one of the benefits of receiving higher education is that your perspective can change a number of times. Sometimes, you see issues and situations in such a totally different light from your first position that you wonder why you ever thought otherwise before. That happened to me over the course of this year with the Barker Center, Harvard's new humanities building, where the scholars of Ralph Ellison, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevski, and Ralph Waldo Emerson now reside.

There's something magical about a new building. The smell of paint mixed with sawdust, the perfectly clean floors, the bustle of moving in, making a new space a more familiar home or office, all give me a thrill. I had the double good fortune this summer to see a new building completed and then to work in it as the interior was polished and belongings brought in. I helped in the moving of the English Department from the Warren House (formerly home of the graduate English program, soon to be home of the Women's Studies Program) to what is, to me, the gleaming, glowing Barker Center. I helped unpack books and move them into new (but, admittedly, smaller) offices. I reveled in the brilliant light and wide open spaces of the atrium and conference rooms. I even loved the new Xerox machines I would learn to use and took a rather too-keen interest in mahogany office furniture. "Isn't this great?" I asked passersby. "Yes, it's nice," they replied, but some of them seemed sad to have left their comfortable, roomy former offices across the way.

And as they spoke I realized that, in my excitement over the light and efficiency of the new, I had forgotten the comfort and dusty elegance of the old. Warren House was home to many English department members for a very long time. Despite, or more accurately because of, its creaking stairs and dark hallways, it seemed to fit right into one part of the mythical Harvard academic atmosphere.

And what of the Barker Center itself? Hadn't I read all the articles about the controversy over whether to preserve the historic Freshman Union, butter patties on the ceiling and all, or to rip it down in the name of progress and the need for more office space? I had, throughout the planning stages and construction of the Barker Center, favored the preservation of the Union for preservation's sake alone, not having ever eaten in the Union but feeling rather that History is History and should be left as is. All of that feeling went out a shiny, clean window when I entered the new building, but my change in perspective got me thinking.

Not many would dispute that frequent change on a number of levels is necessary-after all, if nothing ever changed, Harvard would still be lit by candles and attended only by young white men. But the question of changing our physical surroundings is more complex. Change for the sake of change, for the sake of making imagined progress is surely wrong. Witness the apparently imminent destruction of The Tasty, that greasy but truly historical establishment on JFK Street. Do we really need to empty that space in order to fill it with yet another bank, yet another office, or worse still, a fast food restaurant with just as much grease but none of the claustrophobic charm? I don't think so. Let's leave it. It may not have butter patties on the ceilings, but probably almost as many Harvard freshmen have eaten there as they have in the former Union. Besides, I like the smell of greasy fries just about as much as the fragrance of sawdust mixed with fresh paint.

But change for the sake of real progress, change for the sake of our faculty and students (i.e., decent offices and classrooms in the Barker Center) is, of course, necessary. So I've come to grips about the English Department's losing Warren House. Construction is ongoing now on that building, and workers are cleaning the bathroom of the fictional bloodstains from Amanda Cross (a.k.a. Carolyn Heilbrun)'s Death in a Tenured Position so that the Women Studies Program will soon have a new old space to call its own, smack dab on top of the scene of the original crime.

My old Hollis roommate of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson '21, knew the importance of change and the need to let go when he said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." I did want so much to be true to my first opinion about tradition and the familiar, but the light and open spaces of the Barker Center have made me happily inconsistent. After all, there is a tradition of the new, even here at Harvard.