A Little Local Trouble

Amidst all the talk of rapists arrested in Mather and local salon About Hair being exposed as an illegal brothel, Harvard students might have been surprised to learn that, earlier this month, Cambridge was voted among the top one hundred American communities for young people.

The honor was bestowed upon our humble town by America’s Promise, an organization dedicated to the development and success of America’s youth. Apparently Cambridge harbors a host of community projects for youngsters, helping them to cooperate and use their time in a generally productive manner.

This distinction might be even more surprising to the majority of Harvard students, who are under the impression that Cambridge consists solely of Mass. Ave., JFK Street and a few outgrowing, round-about squiggles. It’s not that we bear the city any hostility, or even care at all what goes on here. Mostly, we’re blissfully indifferent.

According to some student groups, that’s a problem: we don’t care. To ascertain as much, it is necessary only to flick through the pages of this campus publication, where stories of broken House grilles and Lamont cake riots far outnumber weighty local issues. The Institute of Politics group H-Vote tries desperately to get students registered to vote locally, but we make up only two percent of the voting public come election time, despite being a potentially decisive voting bloc.

We value the city instead for its pit-stops, between which we float like bees pollinating, forming only the vaguest impression of the community around us, from Felipe’s, to Staples, to ABP. It would hardly be surprising to find that most Harvard students think the Cambridge streets are constructed of junk food and cheap stationary. We see the place as more of a warehouse than a community, punctuated by the occasional eccentricity: Spare Change Man (“Sir? Girl. Girl you’re lookin’ lovely this evenin’!”), the speed-chess players, and the phony beggars with their signs (“Family killed by Ninjas; need money for Kung Fu lessons”).

It would be easy to think this is a big problem. The Phillips Brooks House Association thinks students should all get more involved, stating among its primary objectives the “[promotion of] social awareness and community involvement at Harvard and beyond.” But to those who say that we aren’t integrated enough into the community, I point to a “real” university town—Oxford, England—as an example of how town-gown relations can sour when students are too tightly woven into the community fabric.

The so-called “Battle of St. Scholastica’s Day” occurred after rising tensions between townsfolk and Oxford University students—tensions attributed to students being governed by the University and not the town, even though the two inhabited the same space—came to a head in a bar brawl at a local tavern. This tiny conflict erupted into a full-scale riot which left nearly one hundred students dead.

Admittedly, this took place in 1355—medieval times—though similar tensions persist. In modern times, the problems are somewhat less dramatic: traffic cones appear on the heads of historic statues; brainless students launch themselves off the famous Magdalene Bridge, surprised when they need an ambulance to haul them out the shallow river; annoying crowds wait in line to enter the town’s few clubs, only to spill out a few hours later and leave their drunken mess on the sidewalk. But even these trivialities draw out the old complaints about the encroaching student population.

So, forgive me for thinking that Cambridge-Harvard relations aren’t really a problem. Yes, we strut around like we own the place, with our heavy volumes of Plato and Voltaire bursting out our big H-branded bags; we launch ourselves recklessly across the streets to the dismay of cab-drivers; we don’t necessarily “care” about the town itself. But the University enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Cambridge, forming an academic community which locals identify as a source of pride—not a symbol of an elitism which they despise.



Juliet Samuel ’09, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.