Lewis Enacts Fireplace Ban, Ignites Controversy

Those living in Harvard’s undergraduate Houses for the summer may be sweating through the July heat—but when the mercury plummets this fall, students won’t be able to resort to dorm room fireplaces for warmth, former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 announced in one of his final acts as dean.

Citing safety concerns, Lewis issued a memo last month prohibiting any use of the roughly 1,700 fireplaces in the Houses, except those in the suites of House masters and senior tutors. Fireplaces in Yard dorms have been covered up since the early 1990s, according to Zachary M. Gingo, manager of administrative operations for Harvard Yard.

“The risk is sufficiently high and the consequences of a failure so catastrophic that it is simply imprudent to continue as we have been and to hope for the best,” Lewis wrote in the memo.

Gingo said he was unsure whether the ban would be enforced by physically blocking chimneys and fireplaces or simply by threat of disciplinary action. Lewis declined to comment.

Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman said that the ban was not provoked by any particular fire caused by fireplaces in the Houses.

“We’ve banned smoking and candles,” he said. “It began to feel odd to us that there was still the provision for making fires in the fireplaces.”

But Dingman said there have been a number of near-misses involving fireplaces with closed dampers—incidents which did not ultimately lead to disaster but might have.

“It’s not a huge number,” he said. “But all you need is one.”

Gingo said that the fire that badly damaged the Eliot House Grille in November 2001 made College officials “more sensitive to the risks of fire.”

“We are fortunate not to have had a more serious incident,” Lewis wrote in his memo.

Still, some students were not swayed by administrators’ arguments.

Matthew W. Mahan ’05, who is chair of the Undergraduate Council’s Student Affairs Committee, said that concerns could be addressed without a ban on fireplaces.

“The reality is that the two real safety concerns stem first, from the University’s refusal to implement a fireplace safety training program and second, from a lack of funding for proper fireplace equipment, such as screens and pokers,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that he thought the administrators’ position “defies logic.”

But Lewis shrugged off the idea of fire-safety education as ultimately unhelpful in the memo.

“Training in the use of fireplaces could not lower our risks sufficiently to make their continued utilization wise,” he wrote.

Mahan also lamented a lack of student consultation on Lewis’ part, mentioning a May 8 meeting of the Committee on House Life that student representatives attended.

“There certainly wasn’t any resolution at that meeting,” he said. “It was just up for discussion, we left for the summer, and then out of the blue, without any additional student input, [Lewis] decided to do it.”

Adams House Co-Master Sean Palfrey said in an e-mail that he was sorry to see the fireplaces go.

“I think it has been a special aspect of Adams House life for generations,” he said. “Recently, relatively few students availed themselves of the opportunity, but for those who did, it was a great pleasure.”

Mahan, too, cited the importance of burning fires in student life.

“There is a certain type of genuine interaction you can’t get from watching TV together, drinking or studying in your room,” he said. “I think it is a shame that the University has decided that we aren’t intelligent enough, old enough and responsible enough to use fireplaces.”

But Palfrey said he understood the decision: the need for student safety outweighed the pleasures brought by crackling fires.

“This is an issue of risks and benefits, and the Harvard administration has to balance these and make their own decisions,” he said. “I am perhaps not as risk averse as others, and believe that there may be alternative ways to minimize the chance of serious fires, but it was not for me to decide.”

Eliot House Master Lino Pertile—who student representatives said had vocally opposed the ban when it was discussed at the May meeting of the Committee on House Life—expressed a similar resigned acceptance.

“The dean took the right decision,” he said. “I’m the first to regret that it had to come to that, but we couldn’t really go on in the Houses with this kind of risk.”

—J. Hale Russell contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.