Speak No Evil

The College is in crisis. Less than a fortnight after returning to school, 6500 undergraduates woke up yesterday as involuntary extras in an Alfred Hitchcock film come to life. This year’s Harvard-Yale tailgate will basically be dry, we were told, and what’s more, the College’s most important recreational athletics facility, the Malkin Athletic Center (MAC), will be closed for renovations as of early next year.

Well kids, it was fun while it lasted, right?

But even as hyperactive Undergraduate Council representatives flood inboxes with petitions to “Save the MAC!” and House Committees hold late-night emergency meetings, all may not be as it seems. Sure, Harvard’s biggest gym will soon go offline—an unexpected disappointment. This year’s tailgate will be drier than ever, and that just plain sucks. But the real problem is that each of these major changes was announced in the middle of shopping week, with nary a footnote about plans to mitigate their consequences. That’s just plain stupid.

For a university that has always been damned good at marketing itself to alumni and potential donors, Harvard is astoundingly inept at explaining simple policy changes to its own students.

Take as an example the creation of Harvard’s new peer-advising program, of which I am fortunate to be a part. Last year, instead of announcing that the popular, 25-year-old Prefect Program would henceforth be better funded and better trained than ever before, the College simply said that the program would no longer exist, and would instead be “morphed into something else.”

Anywhere else on the face of the earth, such a statement probably would have prompted a follow-up question about what exactly the program’s replacement might be. At Harvard, however, it was enough to provoke a firestorm. This newspaper lead its coverage with the headline, “College Pulls Plug on Prefects,” and the prefects themselves, whose tears stained The Crimson’s coverage and garnered great sympathy across campus, were up in arms. For then-new Associate Dean for Advising Programs Monique Rinere, it was the worst first week on the job ever. For everyone else, the fracas was just confusing. And, in the end, it was all for naught.

History barely waited six months to repeat itself. Yesterday’s one-two punch was a masterpiece of public relations incompetence.

Let’s start with the MAC. All that would have been required to pacify the bloodhounds on the UC was a single, well thought-out press release that described the closures and an action plan simultaneously. Extending gym hours, loaning the MAC’s fitness equipment to House gyms, or universalizing access to other athletic facilities could all have been adequate adjustments. But now, instead of a student body looking forward to a new-and-improved MAC, the College has a pack of angry athletes on its hands.

When it comes to this year’s new tailgate rules, meanwhile, silver lining is in fairly short supply. There’s no question that ID checks, pat-downs, and drink charges will put a damper on things. But here, again, there was no good reason for the College to transform its spokesmen into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In a matter of days, administrators and student leaders will start putting their heads together to try to plan a weekend that will be as exciting as ever, despite the new rules. The successful College-sponsored events of the recent past—think Yardfest—suggest that they might just pull it off. But this week, the news is all bad, and the administration has been forced into all-too-familiar damage control. Why University Hall didn’t just wait to announce the new rules until a comprehensive plan for the now-drier tailgate had been developed is beyond me.

By its sins of omission, the College has once again shot itself in the foot. Perhaps this time, as it tries to stop the bleeding, University Hall will realize that putting a positive spin on unfortunate news is anything but rocket science.



Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.