A Matter of Time

It’s about time Harvard gave its undergraduates a 24-hour library.

The reasons are simple: Harvard students, like many university students, keep hours that the adult working world does not share. Many go to bed in the small hours of the morning and wake up just in time for lunch. Also unlike working adults, they often do not have a consistently quiet workplace in their homes (or, in this case, their rooms) in which to study late at night. Further, it goes without saying that the average Harvard undergraduate doesn’t have the space in his or her dorm room for a library containing thousands of resources and reserves. The end-result of these conditions is that Harvard students have no truly adequate or appropriate quiet space in which to work late at night when much of the undergraduate work at Harvard gets done.

Anyone who has ever tried to study in Loker Commons or a House dining hall will confirm the impossibility of significant productivity in the presence of vacuum cleaners, loud conversations, and big-screen televisions. Even if an undergraduate wanted to study late in one of these presently-available alternatives, he or she would be foiled by a 2 a.m. closing time (in the case of Loker) or the need to clean and tidy before the next day arrives (as far as dining halls are concerned).

Lamont is the library most often used by undergraduates, and with good reason. Its sizeable reserves, quiet study space and group work areas make it an ideal place to get work done. But with its present closing time of 12:45 a.m., Lamont, the latest-open library at Harvard (with the exception of Cabot Science Library during exam periods), kicks out users hours before they finish working. We think that Lamont’s books, reserves, and layout make it the ideal library to be kept open for students through the night.

The idea of giving Harvard students a late-night library resource is not a new one. In 2001, the Undergraduate Council passed a bill calling on the Harvard College Library (HCL) system to provide students with a late-night studying space. It took HCL months to finally reject the council’s proposal, citing costs and the wellbeing of library staff as primary concerns. Since then, however, the council seems to have limited its discussion of a 24-hour library to an agreement between candidates every time a council election is held. Both Council President-Elect Matthew J. Glazer ’06 and Vice President-Elect Ian R. Nichols ’06 campaigned (on separate tickets) on a promise of a 24-hour library. We hope the Undergraduate Council has the grit to continue the fight for an increasingly necessary student resource.

HCL has argued in the past that Lamont needs to close in time for employees who rely on subway transit home to catch their train. The Red Line subway that passes under Harvard Square, however, closes early enough that the current 12:45 a.m. closing time must still be prohibitively late for library workers who ride it. When Brown University extended the hours of its Rockefeller Library, it found that it could do so by keeping just one security guard and two student clerks working until the library’s new 2 a.m. closing—most employees leave at midnight.

HCL has also argued that budgetary considerations prevent it from keeping Lamont open later. The extra cost of late night staffing and utilities (heat and light) must, however, be miniscule in comparison to the extensive renovations undertaken by HCL in the recent past. As it stands, Harvard students can admire the beautifully re-done Widener reading rooms, out of which they’re kicked at 10 p.m. at the latest, but then must retire to Lamont, which closes just 2 hours later, to keep working. We think it’s time for HCL to make an investment in the wellbeing of students who work late into the night, costly as it may be.

We suggest keeping Lamont open 24-hours—and if not 24-hours, then at least later into the night—for a semester-long trial period, after which HCL would have the option of cancelling the program if it were too expensive or too underused to be worthwhile.

While students at Cornell, Stanford, and Dartmouth are able to take advantage of study space 24-hours a day, Harvard students are too often left out in the cold (literally) when their libraries close. HCL must make a genuine effort to rectify the situation by leaving its main undergraduate library, Lamont, open around-the-clock.