Building Character, Not Houses

To stay competitive in attracting top-tier students, universities have begun to compete in an arms race over facilities. Our beloved Harvard is of course no exception. From Lamont Café, where students can acquire the caffeine they need to continue the cycle of self-destructive study habits (without even going outside!), to the Fogg Museum, where students are only a short walk away from being able to stab a priceless piece of art in brief spurt of psychological madness, our campus’s facilities shine. However, Harvard outdoes its peers by far with its river housing: Just two weeks ago, for example, Winthrop House’s gym flooded with human excrement.

A normal person may consider sewage in the gym to be less of a service than a threat to public health, but that’s a naïve dichotomy. A threat to public health can also be a service. Yes, the service that Harvard provides through such sanitation (or lack thereof) in the river houses is that same service cited by many fathers and grandfathers retelling their tales of childhood: building character.

All around the river houses, stories of the success of Harvard’s “Character-Building Initiative” (CBI) circulate: Girls received the gift of snowfall in their Winthrop room; blockmates spent an afternoon bailing water out of their Kirkland House second-story window after their bathtub faucet wouldn’t turn off; Adams House students sleep with earplugs because of noisy heating pipes; showers in Kirkland spew out blackish water; doorknobs come off in the hands of Eliot House residents; melting snow leaks into a fourth-story room of a five-story section of Lowell House (of course, the water first had to make it through the layer of asbestos in the ceiling!); and that smell in Adams dining hall only went away after the floorboards were ripped up and a massive cockroach infestation exterminated.

Although these stories sound unique and extreme, CBI is dedicated to developing a stoic quality forged through trials of adversity in each and every Harvard man and woman. The most common program is a room heater that doesn’t work in the winter but kicks on in the spring. The second most common is the placement of two to three students in a room originally designed for one, and often includes “space-saving closets” that cannot close with hangers in them.

While CBI may seem like the result of mere wear-and-tear or a lack of funding, strong evidence suggests that it is actually a coordinated effort among those in Massachusetts Hall. How else could one explain large amounts of money dedicated to refurbishing or building non-residential facilities, while student housing—that the University encourages all students to live in—deteriorates?

Additional evidence can be found by comparing Harvard’s undergraduate housing to other universities. A nearby, far lesser institution (Yale) is engaged in a multimillion dollar project to renovate undergraduate housing. While Harvard students worry about sewage in the basements, Yale students worry about which college will be closed next year for a $70 million face-lift. Of course, Harvard could afford a similar program given that its endowment is 50% larger than Yale’s, but doing so would remove the valuable life lesson Harvard is trying to teach it’s undergraduates: Large corporations that only seek to further their net value often overlook the status of life of those in their charge.

Besides, the easy life is detrimental to the students—as witnessed by a typical Yalie who is weak and soft due to luxurious living. Compare this to a Harvard student, hardened by Darwinistic survival, and it becomes obvious which system is superior.

Harvard’s Character Building Initiative is often the source of scorn in the student population. However, we at The Harvard Crimson wholeheartedly endorse this initiative. And every time that it snows in a room or a basement floods with human waste, we say, “Thank you.” Thank you for not renovating the River Houses, Harvard. Someday we’ll be grateful for all the misery.