Lowell Will Put An End to Pests

If Harvard pest expert Gary Alpert has his way, students will be able to cross cockroach elimination off of their reading period to-do lists.

It was Alpert’s suggestion that spurred the circulation of pest surveys to Lowell House residents last Tuesday. The results of the survey will be used to help direct pest prevention measures in Lowell over winter break.

Such measures, Alpert said, will include inspection of areas in the House where students have reported pest encounters.

The survey asks students to identify locations where they have sighted cockroaches, ants, or mice, as well as the dates of those sightings.

Inspections will focus particularly on drains in areas of reported infestation, which—when dry—provide easy entry for crawling cockroaches.

According to Alpert, the survey was necessary because students were not alerting University officials to the presence of pest intruders.

“We wanted to do as much as possible because right now nobody is complaining about anything,” he said. “We’re not getting reports. All of them ended in September.”

Students, however, say they have been vocal about the vermin their midst.

“There are always plenty of complaints about the [cockroach] issue,” Jessica R. Rosenfeld ’07 wrote in an e-mail.

Rosenfeld, herself a former Lowell resident, is currently taking a semester abroad in Argentina, but felt strongly enough about the cause contra cockroaches to write a letter to The Crimson in late September decrying the College’s handling of the pest problem.

E-mailing from an Argentinean hostel on Sunday, she said that the frustration—and the sting—of her cockroach encounters had not been dulled by distance.

“From the innumerable encounters that I have had, a deep phobia has grown,” she wrote. “Never in my life have I had to live in these conditions before coming to Harvard, and frankly I think that the University should be absolutely ashamed...For the world-renown[ed] university to simply ignore this problem is unacceptable.”

It appeared that at least one Lowell resident thought that the University’s shame should spring from a different source.

In an e-mail to the Lowell open list sent less than two hours after the pest survey itself, Eric B. Linsker ’07 urged his fellow residents to withhold their feedback.

The “genocidal language” of the survey—specifically the decision to refer to cockroaches as “pests”—led readers “to forget that American cockroaches and house mice are, like us, animals,” he wrote.

But Alpert, the entomology officer of the University’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety, said that his strategy for dealing with Lowell did not call for the massacre of any cockroaches. Prevention measures will focus on ensuring the soundness of crucial parts of the plumbing system, which—when cracked—dry out, removing the liquid impediment to critter entry.

“We’re not killing [the cockroaches], we’re just keeping them out,” he said. “Live and let live.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.