Roach Motel?

Let us speculate, for a moment, what Harvard would look like in the aftermath of nuclear war. The Yard, the Business School, the Law School, maybe even the Quad (depending on the strength of the warhead in question), would lie a smoldering heap of lifeless ruins. Four hundred years of history instantly incinerated. Nothing but a pile of dust.

Yet in one corner of the University, life would somehow retain a tenuous grip. It would be in the southern part of campus, along the now-stagnant Charles, among the remains of what were once the River Houses. True to their Harvard roots, these creatures would no doubt already be hard at work building a new civilization.

We are referring to Periplaneta americana, the common American cockroach, ascribed by urban legend with the ability to withstand a nuclear holocaust. Thanks to the fertile breeding grounds of Eliot and Lowell Houses in particular, a healthy population would undoubtedly survive amid the ruins of Harvard.

We will concede that it would be nice to have something "forever Harvard," as the poets might say, in the post-war world--even if that something is a colony of Harvard cockroaches.

Yet the cost, in terms of convenience to today's undergraduates, is awfully steep. We cannot mince words: cockroaches are loathsome. There is very little more revolting than watching cockroaches scurry through one's room in the middle of the night. And the species native to the Harvard ecosystem grows to a truly disgusting length of an inch to an inch-and-a-half, no pretty sight in the bathroom before breakfast.

But, either out of concern for the future of Harvard after nuclear war or perhaps out of sentimental attachment to these wily Blattodea, the Houses in question don't do enough to help students stomp out the roach population. In Eliot House, for instance, some students who complained were told to deal with the roaches themselves.

The Houses can do better than that. Instead of leaving their squeamish students to fend off the fearsome insects themselves, the College should do more to make sure the Houses are bug-free at the beginning of the term. Roaches may be indestructible in the face of nuclear annihilation, but one thing they can't withstand is a visit from the exterminator.