Tools of the Stool

Times are tough at Harvard. Our huge endowment is now a less huge endowment. Young liberals campus-wide are still sobbing into their cappuccinos over Scott Brown’s victory.  Childhood dreams about working at Goldman Sachs have been crushed, and the prospect of sub-six-figure salaries is becoming a horrifying reality.

But even before these bleak times, Harvard was party to a gross injustice. Even at the height of its glory, it harbored a nasty deficiency that threatened and continues to threaten the quality of student life. I am referring, of course, to the quality of our toilet paper.

The toilet paper at Harvard does not offer the gentle and comforting caress that is to be expected at a university of international renown. Indeed, the toilet paper provided is inexcusably average, and of no comfort to the pale and pampered tush of the average Harvard student. Many minutes of study time have been wasted by this glorified tissue paper and its frustrating inability to properly attend to even the lightest of Au Bon Pain and frappacino-infused pâtés, let alone a heavy-duty Rubinoff and Noch’s combo.

This outrageous inconvenience is only compounded by the Stalinesque two-roll-per-visit quotas on toilet paper acquisitions.

This draconian rationing of toilet paper reveals itself as such when an urgent undergraduate, gorged on squash and Our Dear Leader’s weekly gift of hot sausage and eggs, finds himself perched on a porcelain potty. Smug because of a particularly generous offering to the Charles River, his hand reaches for his janitorial set only to find unwelcoming and coarse texture of a cardboard tube. Panic and rage set in.

Two toilet rolls is perfectly reasonable if they are of suitable quality, possessing both the tensile strength to accommodate a particularly involved cleaning and the softness necessary to accommodate the delicate extremities of a budding academic. But this ration is utter madness when the toilet paper in question is the quality of a Great Depression-era phone book page. What could have been accomplished in two swift wipes now requires twice the effort and demands thrice the material.

According to my conservative estimates toilet paper-less defecation occurs at a rate of at least 40.5 freshman tushies and 23 upperclassmen tushies a day. Comfort and peace of mind demand that we take action. The first step that must be taken is to provide a brand of toilet paper that is both comfortable enough to accommodate the discerning buttocks and durable enough to prevent messy private failure. Quality toilet paper can be consumed like caviar—in smaller amounts than fast food but with greater amounts of utility.

Indeed, this idea should even appeal to more conservative bathroom-goers who might assume that higher quality toilet paper is an unnecessary expense. With better toilet paper, we can accomplish with a single transcendent wipe what would have required multiple unsatisfying squares and save a considerable amount of money. The bathroom tissue we currently employ, Georgia Pacific’s “Preference”, is available at 76¢ per roll and Charmin’s “Ultra Soft”, a bathroom tissue befitting a patrician, is a reasonable 83¢ per roll. That extra seven cents is an investment in the comfort of the next Emerson, and will allow us to once again raise aloft a standard of obscene luxury that Yale and peer institutions will again struggle to match.

No matter what we do about this crisis, it seems clear that something must be done. Put yourself in the place of the deprived defecator stuck on a toilet with choice between public embarrassment and private filthiness. How would you resolve such an impossible dilemma?

Derrick Asiedu ’12, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House