Student Groups’ Proliferation And The Conversion Of Hilles

To the editors:



Many thanks for your recent op-ed (“Stemming the Tide,” Oct. 13), with its bracingly dire portrait of Harvard’s plague of student clubs. Its author, Adam M. Guren, shows an excellent and most perceptive contempt for the young. It is something I have experienced myself, this contempt, strolling through the Yard, assailed at all sides by bankers’ boys in blazers and jeans like a bunch of dime-store White Stripes, girls furred in leg warmers against the warmth of the May, and each one of them First Secretary of the Students Allied for South Uighur Vegetarianism or President of the Junior Guild for Amateur Bakecraft.

But how many students in the College have even a passing familiarity with the Uighurs? Not many, if their reading habits are any indication. What Guren does not mention, but which is devastating proof of his point, is that, for want of students to use it, Hilles Library is now being gutted to make spacious meeting rooms for student clubs with two members.

Hilles Library I loved. That palace of glass, that heirloom of Radcliffe, eyrie of learning, bastion of browsing, birthdom of our memories, is now left decimated by the faceless hordes of Harvard College, tomes torn up for fancy résumés and paper airplanes. Dark Age gargoyles, awful epigones: Weep, you undergraduates, if you have tears to spill!



BENJAMIN LETZLER

Cambridge, Mass.

October 18, 2005



The writer is a student at Harvard Law School.