$18 Billion and No HBO?

Many questions still had to be answered before I would be able to sit down and watch the season opener of “The Sopranos.”

Would the Quincy Junior Common Room be open? Would the TV turn on (mind you, I live in Quincy)? And, most importantly, would the room be free of conscientious objectors? I trembled at the notion of puritanical types who might object to watching a dysfunctional family of murderous and blasphemous crack-peddling Mafiosi.

Despite my initial concerns, the door to the JCR was unlocked, the TV was functional and the room was empty except for me and Rory. It seemed nothing was going to keep a guy from Connecticut (me) and a guy from Idaho from watching a show denigrating life in New Jersey. Except for Harvard University, of course.

While there were multiple channels of “Telemundo”—uno a cuatro—and even “Cinemundo,” there was no HBO.

In its mission to outdo its own unprecedented acts of staggering cheapness in the area of toilet paper purchasing, Harvard has deemed the bare bones basic cable package sufficient to meet its institutional cable television needs. But as every “Sopranos” fanatic knows, basic cable is simply inadequate.

Given this elementary truth and the fact that the Sopranos are now the axis upon which the world of popular culture spins, one would think that there would not only be HBO in Harvard’s common rooms but that cable (the good kind, with HBO and Cinemax) would be in all of Harvard’s dorm rooms. Having ready access to HBO would also preclude the need for a new Department of New Jersey Studies.

So why is Harvard opposed to this the spread of this universal feature of modern life?

The College administration, as channeled through the body, mind and spirit of Philip A. Bean, former associate dean of freshmen, laid out Harvard’s official party line on the matter in FM last February. According to a Harvard-commissioned study of “area college students,” only 10-20 percent of students voluntarily subscribed to cable service when it was available, leaving colleges to cover the cost of the remaining 80-90 percent of unused cable hookups for which the cable company nonetheless demands payment. This translates into higher hidden “technology fees” for students and parents come termbill time, says Mother Harvard. Furthermore, Bean portrays the greedy cable industry as the big bad HBO bandit because it would force Harvard to cover the entire cost of wiring its campus for service.

First, “Harvard: Hidden Termbill Increases” would be an acceptable answer to the SAT Verbal analogy “CRACK FIEND: CRACK.” Whatever Harvard’s motivations for withholding cable are, they surely have nothing to do with keeping termbill increases either transparent or democratic. Prescription drug plan expansion. Activities fee hikes. Mandatory telephone service, which, as a bonus, is run by idiots. Need I list more?

I also feel compelled to challenge Harvard’s assessment of how many students will voluntarily sign up for cable service. This campus is a world leader in needless luxury expenses. Cars are purchased to drive from the Quad to the Yard. Many people will pay other students to wash their clothes. Were cable available, my neighbors on the third floor of Quincy might subscribe just to spare themselves the agony of listening to me try to install DirecTV in my dorm room. It’s hard to put a price on avoiding the haunting screams of violent anger and defeat associated with me and my roommates’ installation of the satellite pointing out of our common room window—an enterprise whose only success, by the way, was in demonstrating empirically that DirecTV dishes are in fact governed by the laws of gravity.

There is, however, still the lingering issue of the cost to the University of wiring cable through all the first-year dorm rooms and upperclass Houses. This is a good point. My god, the University barely springs for sufficient electrical outlets in most rooms on campus, let alone 150 glorious channels of digital cable. So in a world where an $18 billion endowment affords you 1920s-style access to electricity and lamps which are basically designed to break when touched, I guess it might actually seem crazy to wire buildings just for the sake of cable television even if the cable company does not seem to regard this as a charity.

But then again, other institutions with far less wealth but buildings nearly as expensive to retrofit with new-fangled cable technology have nonetheless swallowed the cost and installed cable. Even Lesley University has cable! Lesley University! Do they even have professors?

If cost truly was a limiting factor, Harvard still had a tremendous opportunity to install cable at huge savings when it installed high-bandwidth Internet lines. No doubt there was clamoring for cable in the early ’90s when all the work on the University network took place. Even way back then people wanted their wars televised and electric rotisseries available for purchase right from their living rooms. Yet when all the wiring was complete, there was not a new cable outlet to be found.

The cost of installing cable relative to Harvard’s ability to pay for cable and its past unrealized opportunities to do the job at huge savings leads me to the conclusion that Harvard has chosen not to avail the student body of cable because, in a fine example of market logic invading the purportedly separate academic sphere, it has no financial reason to care. The student body is expendable and the administration behaves accordingly. Almost 20,000 kids applied to Harvard last year and the administration only needs 1,600 or so to fill all the beds (not that there are enough beds). The odds are in the administration’s favor that they are going to be able to fill them. Will people stop coming to Harvard if there aren’t frivolities like cable? I think we all know the answer to that question.

So while I applaud Harvard’s corporate efficiency, I question its just place as a guiding principle in the care of an entire community of people rather than as a mantra taught at a better-business seminar. Trivializing student life contributes to an atmosphere of hostility and resentment between the administration and the students—especially when the administration tries to deflect attention from its economics-driven decision to ignore undergrads by pretending its hands are tied by the greed of cable companies.

Denying students cable may not prompt a protest march, but it doesn’t promote goodwill between students and administrators either. Presumably we’re still an academic community as well as a budding Fortune 500 corporation. Giving the student body cable might go a long way.

In the meantime, I sit here in my room, ever-barren of cable, and wait for the VHS copy of last week’s Sopranos to arrive by FedEx from Providence where my roommate’s girlfriend kindly taped it for us.

As I channel my OCD into repeatedly clicking the send/receive button on Outlook in anticipation of my package notification, I muse about how I might try to remedy this cable drought were I a mob boss from New Jersey rather than a lowly student journalist from Harvard. But then again, I’ll never know. I don’t have HBO.

Peter D. Hopkins ’04 is a government concentrator in Quincy House. One of his previous FM pieces is the basis for the upcoming Drew Barrymore film Riding on Motorcycles With Girls.