A Cowardly Move

When I put my fire irons, poker, brush and screen into storage in late May, I had no idea that they would be totally useless this fall. In his final administrative days, former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 robbed us of the privilege to build a cozy wood fire on a cold winter evening.

When the lame duck Lewis ordered a permanent ban on all fireplace use, he committed the sort of authoritarian maneuvering that Harvard students, alumni and faculty should never have to accept from the administration. But since he did it at the end of his tenure, Lewis disgraced himself and his distinguished record, creating a sour note comparable to (though I love the guy) Clinton’s presidential pardons.

It’s the same way the Bush administration uses Friday afternoons to make public its most disgraceful policy decisions—such as the August 29th announcement that the Federal Energy Commission had reached a settlement of just over $1 million with California energy companies. This was a great deal for the corporations, which had ripped Californians off by $8.9 billion, according to the California Independent System Operator. But I digress.

But it wasn’t just how Lewis announced his last crackdown—at a time when no students were around to protest—that bothers me. I have a problem with the ban itself. After allowing students to responsibly build fires for hundreds of years, somebody at University Hall insisted that we had been wrong the whole time, and that fiery death was just around the corner. So instead of increasing safety precautions through new rules, they instituted a radical and wholly unnecessary shift in policy.

There’s just something about having a fireplace, and a wood fire, that makes the Cambridge winter just slightly less intolerable. It warms the heart and the mind. Having a glass of wine by the fire is much more romantic than sitting in front of the radiator, or worse, the television.

If our administrators can’t trust us to safely burn wood in our fireplaces, they might as well take away other basic privileges and bar up all our windows or give us a 1 a.m. curfew. And what of Harvard-owned faculty housing—are the beautiful professors’ houses near the quad going to have fire bans as well? After all, our professors can be just as absent minded as we can be. Perhaps even more so.

Rather than enacting a total ban, the administration should adopt a more moderate safety policy by increasing the penalties for improper use. Students who build fires without screens or leave the flu closed could face probation or other rebuke from the administrative board. Individual students (and suites) could be put on a ban list, following close calls or smoke alarms. In this way, the policy would encourage more responsible use.

Give us back this wonderful privilege, and we will not abuse it.

—Nicholas F.B. Smyth is an editorial editor.