Just Sleep On It

A crisis is brewing. In light of a several recent studies underscoring the importance of sleep for strong academic performance, a number of Massachusetts colleges have become alarmed to discover just how little their students are sleeping. The problem is endemic to many institutions—according to a 2007 study, nearly 40 percent of college students reported feeling rested no more than two nights a week.

As a result, several nearby colleges including BU, MIT, Tufts, and Wellesley, have initiated sleep-awareness campaigns to enlighten students about the need for Z’s. With 24-hour libraries, time-consuming extracurriculars, and easy access to caffeine and study-aids, many college students have forgotten how to go to bed and need reminding. The Boston Globe reported that MIT has started a sleep class to help students unwind. A few miles away, Wellesley has begun to throw pajama parties.

Harvard students are not immune to this epidemic of sleep deprivation, and here in Cambridge, the issue is coming to a head. However, a shortage of pajama parties is not the problem—the problem is a shortage of pajamas. The biggest reason that Harvard students find themselves sleep-deprived seems fairly obvious: We are simply having too much fun. We party too hard, and we strip down too often. A 2007 survey by Harvard University Health Services found that just over half of Harvard students had engaged in sexual intercourse at least once. This astronomically high number should alarm us—have we completely forgotten our fair college’s Puritan roots? Aside from the obvious ethical and moral questions premarital sex raises, between-the-sheets workouts tonight are a surefire way to guarantee we’re tired tomorrow. Indeed, some students are even engaging in sex on weeknights. Enter any House laundry room and you may find that the complementary condom boxes are not completely full. Enter any House dining hall, and you will find that at least one or two students has got the sex glow. This is positively disgusting.

Sex aside, Harvard students cannot seem to learn to hit the books. With a vaguely worthwhile party occurring on campus nearly once every three to four weeks, Harvard students lack the restraint to stay in their dorms. The worst offenders among us sometimes venture out two to three nights a week, and some of these students drink on at least one of these nights. Recently, some Mt. Auburn final clubs have been heard playing loud music as early in the week as Wednesday. Our minds are in disturbia, indeed: This sort of behavior is an embarrassment. We must collectively cross our fingers that we will narrowly escape The Princeton Review’s list of top party schools next year, as we are teetering on the edge of being publicly exposed as a wild bunch.

Officials at other Boston-area colleges have been quicker to address this issue than Harvard, but our administration should follow suit and initiate its own sleep-awareness campaign before it’s too late. Hopefully this will focus on the ways in which exhaustion-inducing patterns are negatively impacting our daily lives, and moreover, how our wild behavior may someday squelch our dreams of achieving national political office (oh, wait, never mind). Perhaps in the name of involving campus leaders, the administration could additionally call on members of True Love Revolution, Harvard’s leading abstinence promoter, to enlighten fellow students about the dangers of premarital sex with respect to sleep-deprivation. Other solutions may be sought, but at the very least, something must be done to avert this impending disaster.