Freshmen Appease River Gods Early

Housing Day Eve and its rituals came a day early this year for a few enthusiastic freshmen afraid of incurring the wrath of both the River Gods and the College administration, which had warned the Class of 2013 the police would be monitoring unsafe activity along the river Wednesday night.

Dean of Freshman Thomas A. Dingman ’67 sent an e-mail to the freshman class on Friday condemning River Run, a “supposed tradition that involves drinking a lot of alcohol in the courtyard of the Houses along the Charles River.”

Despite the e-mail’s threats, a few freshmen blocking groups decided to take their chances and celebrate River Run a night early.

“We were planning on doing it at some point, but when we got the email we decided to do it tonight,” said one freshman male, who asked to remain anonymous in order to avoid angering the administration whilst pleasing the River Gods.

He added that, along with two of his female blockmates, he looked up safe burning methods online, built a boat out of newspaper, set it on fire, and dropped it into the Charles from Weeks Footbridge, where it “was extinguished quickly.”

The trio then trekked to their seven preferred houses with vodka-filled water bottles to take shots in honor of the River Gods.

One anonymous freshman female said that her blocking group took advantage of what they thought was a loophole in the River Run restrictionsby making a “raft” of sticks and leaves.

A “raft” is “not technically a boat,” she explained.

Her party ultimately decided not to light their floating creation on fire due to safety concerns, though they inscribed it with the names of Houses they feared would claim them—Mather, Dunster, Cabot, and Winthrop—and drew flames around them.

“It’s like the only one of Harvard’s traditions that doesn’t involve public embarassment because youre not running around naked or having sex in the stacks,” she said of her decision to partake in River Run festivities last night.

The College administration moved to crackdown on this year’s River Run after “some members of the Class of 2012 took housing day rituals to an extreme” last year, Dingman wrote in his e-mail.

Last year, some students doused their boats in flammable liquids, such as nail polish, and the Cambridge Fire Department was summoned when onlookers thought the Weld Boathouse was on fire.

“We have so few traditions at Harvard, so to stamp out one we have is disappointing,” the freshman male said. “It would be like trying to stop tailgating at Harvard-Yale.”

—Chris R. Kingston contributed reporting to this story.