For Whom Was the Gong Stolen?

Those seeking culinary asylum in Adams House’s dining hall between the hours of 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. this week were surely met with the same Medieval lack of hospitality as ever—but, for the second month in a row, no correspondingly barbaric music reminded onlookers of the House’s closed borders. Adams’ gong is still gone, and it will not be missed by the rest of the free world. But a far more discomforting silence has greeted the ears over intersession: the silence of complacency. It has been only a few weeks since Mather House declared unilateral war on its riverside peer on the grounds that Kirkland House had taken the gong. Where is the campus outrage at this act of martial arrogance?

War must always be a last resort, for any House—even for the River’s last superpower. (Harvard’s cutting-edge political scientists measure global strength in cubic yards of concrete.) Sadly, it is patent that Mather has made its declaration against Kirkland without even the briefest of diplomatic engagements. No attempt seems to have been made to involve the Undergraduate Council in the mounting problem of the gong; nor could Mather be troubled to wait for final exams to start before crying havoc. This war is an act of unacceptable spontaneity, announced and perhaps conceived in the proverbial drunken, naked run around the Yard at midnight. This is not the way civilized Houses conduct relations with their peers.

Even more shocking are the growing questions surrounding Mather’s pretext for initiating aggression. Where is the evidence that Kirkland has the gong? At the outbreak of war, Mather pointed to circumstantial indicators including a UPS slip signed by a notable Kirkland resident, and let their hysterical rhetoric do the rest. But time has cast harsh doubt on that slip’s authenticity—indeed, some have even suggested that high-ranking officials of Mather’s House Committee altered the slip to implicate Kirkland.

These are serious charges, and their ultimate validity is yet to be determined. But still more uncertainty surrounds Mather’s motivations. It is well known that Adams had something resembling a gong in its dining hall, but no one knows whether it was more than a round, bronze symbol. The gong had not been heard to ring since Adams’ losing war with Pforzheimer House, now more than a decade in the past. Listen closely to the chatter in Mather’s dingy halls of power: those who once talked of earth-shaking malletted tones now talk of “gong-related program activities.” Forget Kirkland—did any Houses in the region have functioning gongs ready to resound at any interhouse interloper within seconds, as has been claimed by the most ardent hawks? The more time passes, the more it seems like Mather is only after the DeWolfe apartments, now occupied by Kirkland affiliates, that it mentioned in its declaration of war.

When war is acceptable, it is only as the endpoint of the collective judgment of a broad-based, trustworthy alliance of parties. Despite Mather’s claims to the contrary, this is sadly absent in the present conflict. Louie (of Louie’s) and three or four guys in a DeWolfe blocking group do not a coalition make.

Of course, no one can be sad to see Adams deprived of its instrument of exclusivity—nor, frankly, is Kirkland’s housing-lottery superiority complex particularly palatable. But there are right ways to deal with problems among the Houses, and Mather has very clearly picked the wrong way. This reckless, unjustified round of attacks cannot stand.