Loker's Second Coming

Loker Commons, where student life initiatives used to go to die, is a scary place. Emblems of unachieved potential are everywhere. The common areas designed to accommodate intermingling undergraduates are nightly taken over by math tutors in funny hats, the jukebox spurns our nickels, and Loker Coffeehouse serves not coffee but coursepacks. More often than not, the place is deserted but for a handful of Yard-dwelling first-years playing pool.

Imagine our surprise, then, when The Crimson Staff, on its nightly stroll through the North Yard, happened two weeks ago upon a Loker Commons full of gyrating undergraduates, pulsating music, and, gasp! cheap alcohol. It was an experience so wholly alien that we left immediately, writing the whole experience off as some bizarre form of group hallucination brought on by the fumes of certain Crimson staffers in an office next to ours.

Two weekends later, it happened again. What was this recurring nightmare? What was happening to our Poe-esque subterranean social space? Why was the draught beer Pabst Blue Ribbon? Shouldn't they know better?

Pub Night has arrived at Harvard with a wave of acclamation more powerful than an exploding brewery tank of fine, smoked porter. In one fell swoop, it has solved a problem older than the dining hall sheet cake and tougher than the smoked duck. For years, Harvards social scene has been one of feast and famine. While upperclassmen gorged themselves on venues from Red Line to the occasional wildlife-themed, well-endowed social club, underclassmen were systematically denied their just deserts. Lokers resurrection has the potential to breathe life into a stratified Harvard social scene gripped by 300-year-long rigor mortis. The Harvard College Deans Office, Harvard Student Agencies, the Undergraduate Council, and Veritas Records, which cooperated to put on the two Pub Nights so far, deserve all the thanks they have received.

Biweekly Pub Nights are not enough. With their success, hope ought to be rekindled among Harvard undergraduates that Memorial Hall's cavernous gut might soon be converted to serve a permanent function. Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross '71 take notice: the success of Pub Nights is as clear an indicator as any that Loker Commons can be a real center for student life with the right adjustments. A permanent campus pub would anchor such a centersomething that this campus has sorely missed for centuries.

As some of our number succumbed to the temptation of the dance floor and others fell victim to the pull of the (disappointingly poor quality) domestic beer selection--c'mon, America makes better than Miller and Bud--the rest of us found ourselves drawn to the portrait of Commons benefactor and namesake Katherine Bogdanovich Loker, which graces the rooms western wall. In her eyes, where once there was disappointment and shame at the squandering of her generosity, we saw something new--hope.