A Dorm's Eye View

During one January reading period in the early 1970s, a first-year in Matthews Hall conspired to flush all the building’s toilets at once. When the ageing plumbing exploded, he was suspended for a year. Although it’s unlikely that residents of Matthews that year have forgotten the incident, it is lost to most, buried deep in Harvard history.

But with the publication of Crimson Dorm Life projected for December 2003, the stories of this mischievous Matthews resident along with many others will be brought to light thanks to Weston M. Hill ’94, a former teaching fellow and psychology concentrator in Kirkland House. After seeing an old photo of a dorm room in a book on the history of Leavitt and Peirce, a store on Mass. Ave. and former student meeting place, Hill set out to document a sort of cultural history of Harvard students—their dorm rooms and possessions, their amusements and pranks. “I wondered what it was like 200 years ago,” he says. “It’s the book I wish I had had as a student.”

Immediately, he delved into the Harvard Archives, where he still researches three or four times a week in his quest to “create a living ongoing documentation of dorm life.” Most of his anecdotal material is drawn from archive photographs, most of them taken by a single student in 1901. The book will feature many of these photographs, including one of a luxuriously furnished dorm room, complete with marble busts and oriental rugs from the 1870 class album. In his quest for historic accounts of dorm life, Hill also peruses the student-published Harvard Magazine of 1854 to 1864 for essays on the undergraduate experience.“When I research I like to be very thorough,” he says. “That’s how you find great little tidbits. In each volume I find some amazing things.”

So far, Hill has uncovered colorful stories of Harvard student traditions that have since disappeared, some of which he hopes to rekindle as a result of his research. “If I had known about some of these things I would have wanted to do them,” he says. From 1818 to 1860, sophomores challenged first-years to a rough game of football at the beginning of the school year. When the faculty outlawed the game because of annual injuries, students held a funeral for the tradition, complete with a coffin for the deceased football and eulogy written partly in Latin. In Adams House, students participated in a raft race on the Charles River. One year, MIT students entered the contest and sped to the finish by hiding an engine under their raft.

Although Harvard students have never matched MIT’s outrageous “hacks,” they still went to great lengths to amuse themselves. Stories are still told of the suitemates in Lowell who held a pool party in their room, trucking sand into the dorm and blowing up an inflatable pool. The party ended with a splash when too many students jumped into the pool and the floor fell through. When the Cabot dining hall flooded in the 1980s, students dove in and practiced the breast stroke.

In his own undergraduate years during the early 1990s, Hill had no lack of fun. He recalls shooting water guns from his windows straight up so that his victims would not know who had shot them. He and his roommates also sat in their room kicking a beach ball so that it would never hit the floor. “We could play that for two and a half hours,” he says.

But Hill wonders whether current Harvard students would lazily kick a beach ball to procrastinate. “Is there spontaneity in student life today?” he wonders. In search of invitations to tour current students’ rooms, he put up posters last spring asking, “Do you love your dorm room?” He was surprised by how intensely students organize their lives and how dominated they are by technology.

Though his research continues, Hill has noticed some salient differences between students or today and those of earlier generations. “It’s a different way of life,” he says. Hill has seen a decline in many of the house traditions and in the leisure time of students, which, he speculates, is a result of randomization in the house system, email and more organized activities. “There’s probably a lot more volunteering going on, which is great,” he conjectures.

And, Hill has noticed, less alcohol. “The booze doesn’t flow as easily today,” he notes, recalling an annual Kirkland Kentucky Derby Day in the 1980s flooded in beer. Hill says that the crackdown on alcohol may have affected the kinds of leisure activities in which students engage. “Mischief still goes on but in a different way,” Hill says, though he is is currently soliciting input from current students to discover what this way is.

Although he keeps himself busy with research for his book, eagerly touring dorm rooms or leafing through yellowed Harvard publications, Hill also interviews people, like him, who have been recently laid off. Since graduation, Hill has worked several jobs and relishes the idea that he is “doing not-working.” He says he never wanted one career and makes a goal of “finding things that are really meaningful.” For now, Crimson Dorm Life is his next step. “It’s loads of fun,” he says. “I may go bankrupt before I finish it, but it beats a desk job.”