Master Perspective: Tom and Verena Conley on Harvard House Life

In July 2000, Romance flooded Dunster Street. Three of the four new House Masters taught French or Italian literature at Harvard: Among them were Kirkland House’s new additions, Tom C. and Verena A. Conley. Tom teaches in the Romance Language and Literatures Department, while Verena is a professor of comparative literature. Both were chosen according to a rubric of professional distinction, personal character, and the ability to lead a community of students and scholars.

“We were babes in the woods,” recalls Tom, leaning back into one of two green linen chairs (Verena occupies the other) opposite a matching sofa in their 85 Dunster St. residence. He looks over at his wife, who shakes her head with a laugh. Before a former dean asked them to apply, they hadn’t thought much about it, they say.

“We had no idea what House life is like,” Tom recalls.

Thirteen years later (“the lucky 13,” Verena says ruefully), the Conleys are more well-versed in the art of maneuvering the intricacies of the Harvard House system. The two are natural hosts in their Dunster Street home. Books and DVDs cram the shelves of their dark-oak-paneled sitting room; the granite countertop of their (Harvard-renovated) kitchen has hosted cooking classes for students sponsored by the Food Literacy Project. A few minutes after I arrive the doorbell rings: It’s two Kirkland students returning from walking the Conleys’ Bernese mountain dogs, Max and Bella. The dogs settle between the green linen chairs where they will remain for our conversation, nudging their owners’ legs, tugging at Verena’s shoe. “They love the attention,” Tom says. Max and Bella never have to look too far for such attention, with a constant stream of dog-walking volunteers and willing dining hall company.

A Student Connection

Both the Conleys understand these interactions with students to be central to their role as House Masters—a role they take care to distinguish from that of professors uninvolved in House life. “You get to know the students as people,” Verena says, “and not as Harvard students, capital H.”

“Not as papers,” Tom adds.

Tom and Verena say they tend to see the students in their departments always in the same setting, in their classes in Boylston or the Dana Palmer House. In class Tom is known to act out scenes from medieval French poetry, writhing on the ground in mock-pain. Verena is slightly quieter, a faint Germanic accent modulating her words and gestures. When either of them grows animated they tend to talk over each other, two parallel conversational threads until one yields inevitably to the other.

The couple is recognized within and beyond Kirkland for presiding proudly over a community that supporters might call quirky, or detractors incestuous, but one that most Harvard students would agree constitutes a quintessential example of an immersive House environment. The Conleys revel in their role at the center of it all: As House Masters they claim a privileged understanding not only of Kirkland students, but also of the possibilities and challenges inherent to the Harvard House system—and of the steps necessary to forging a successful House community.

Their interactions with students within Kirkland, the Conleys say, permit a more nuanced understanding of their personalities, their particularities. The students whose faces they might recognize from class take on a greater depth when encountered in a different context than the classroom.

“Those who are not House Masters,” says Tom, “who are not intimately related with House activities, have very little idea of what Harvard undergraduates put onto themselves. How much they overbook—in a very positive sense.”

Tom claims that this nuanced understanding of student life has directly influenced his teaching style, that it has allowed him to be more easy going, for example. Modifying his expectations, according to Tom, has done much to improve the students’ classroom experience in general. “When there’s less pressure,” he explains, “students will be inventive—will take greater, more daring, and more productive risks.”

Professors might get to know a student one semester, then never see him or her again; they might have a conversation with someone in office hours that is never followed up. The Conleys have learned from their perspective in Kirkland that the role of House Master allows them to prevent students from slipping through the cracks. Verena grows animated as she mentions seeing students evolve from the time they arrive at the House as 19-year-olds until they leave as full-fledged adults.

“You see the problems they have,” she says, “the pains of growing up. They’re really changing in these three years.”

Although students will inevitably depart the Kirkland cocoon, Tom and Verena claim that the world begins to seem smaller when home is anchored in a House. For them the world beyond Kirkland seems crammed with House alumni, who “crop up,” says Verena, “when you least expect it.” Walking out of a Paris airport she’s run into a former student; shopping in Whole Foods last week, they came across another; checking online updates keeps the couple abreast of marriages, jobs, and news. “Who was it who emailed last night?” Verena asks Tom, who knits his brow but can’t remember. He shrugs. “It’s an infinite conversation,” Tom says.

On the Agenda

For students past and present, the role of the Harvard House Master is perhaps by design broadly defined. Asked if they consider themselves professors, advisers, or surrogate parents, Verena interrupts and responds, “All three.”

It’s important, they say, that Kirkland become a place to which students look forward to returning after class at the end of each day, that the community somehow “works.” The Conleys have learned to balance this goal with their own obligations and need to be leaders in their professional worlds.

“Il y va de la gloire,” says Tom, who tends to insert French expressions or philosophical terms into conversation: “Our own esteem is at stake.”

This emphasis on pursuing their own professional goals, while encouraging those of students, is “something that I think the students appreciate,” he says.

The Conleys have found ways to intertwine these professional and personal threads. The two have worked with resident scholars and have used their own professional connections to pull strings in bringing big names to Kirkland—Alec Baldwin, Richard Dreyfus, every Democratic hopeful for the 2004 election—in a forum called “Conversations with Kirkland.” The House hosts a screenwriting seminar with Law & Order writer David Black. Kirkland’s yearly talent show has been taking place since 2002.

“We had a moribund drama society that now produces two plays a year,” says Verena—generally a Shakespeare play in the fall, and a student-written musical in the spring.

Many of these programs are student-driven, but part of the Conleys’ multiform role at Harvard is to cheerlead and promote programs that busy students might otherwise abandon. “Someone has to be behind them,” says Tom, leaning back and resting his head on his fist. “And it’s generally us.”

No such nudging is necessary for one House program, though: Tom Conley’s renowned Kirkland House wine seminar. When I ask about this, Tom’s Cheshire cat grin grows wider, and Verena lets out a knowing chuckle: They knew this question was coming.

In 2006, Tom, an oenophile who prefers the more “natural” essence of Old World wines, teamed up with a former resident dean to offer a one-time wine tasting event in the Senior Common Room.

“It had great success,” Tom says with a smile—enough that the following year, several members of the women’s water polo team approached him to ask if they could produce a seminar around these topics. The result? “Oenography: For a Topology of Wine.”

“The sensations of what we taste become the elements of the space we fashion from the places we study,” read the syllabus. Fifteen students were all able to get credit—the class was offered weekly, and required presentations and papers.

“Then the news got out,” Tom says. Over 100 students applied the next year, and despite an arduous vetting process the class still grew.

“And then a third year the department wondered how I could be doing 36 independent studies,” Tom says. “And,” he adds, shrugging nonchalantly, feigning confused candor, “they called it into question.”

These days the not-for-credit seminar attracts about 90 students each spring (as the term goes on, according to Tom, many drop off for the final weeks of thesis-writing, before recommitting after spring break). Kirkland’s wine cellar, built in 2005, has allowed for reasonably-priced wines to age and mature before they’re offered to student palates. (Tom began with a price limit of $10; now he goes up to $12 or $14.)

Challenges At Home

Of course, while programs, activities, and seminars form the more light-hearted aspects of House life—promoting community, encouraging conversations, expanding upon academics—the Conleys admit that more difficult periods and knottier challenges are another, inevitable part of leading a House.

A year after the Conleys moved into the Masters’ residence, for example, the events of September 11 sent shock waves reverberating through the country; neither Kirkland nor Harvard was spared. Some students were affected personally, and many were distressed. Dealing with a national catastrophe became part of the House Master’s role.

The Conleys have witnessed other difficult moments, they say. The unforeseen shock that accompanies the death of a student’s family member, for example, is something that necessitates the support of a House community, according to Tom.

The couple grows somber, their pace slows, as they agree that the death of a student is the most directly devastating tragedy among the members of a House. “There is nothing that disrupts a House more than a suicide,” Tom says.

Both the Conleys stress that, in these situations, the House and its masters play a crucial part in providing a support system. “When there is a death, it is a death in the [House] family,” Tom says. “There is immediate extension of aid to be given on the part of one and all.” In this, he says, the setup of the Harvard House system is uniquely valuable.

Verena nods, agreeing that such events should and, at least in Kirkland’s case, do result in a unifying atmosphere within the House, that the community, as a result, coheres.

13 Years

The Conleys say that they accepted the position of House Master in the hopes of maintaining and strengthening such a community. “We found that there was an incredible effervescence,” Tom says, on arriving to Kirkland in 2000. “As we got going we found that we could put events together that would enhance the sense of community and keep the bubbles bubbling.”

With a 13-year retrospective since their own first weeks in a House, the Conleys say that Kirkland is still a strong community—even if, for a variety of reasons, the terms and perhaps even the definition of community have shifted.

“The students are still as effervescent as they were when we came,” Verena says, “but their interests are slightly different since 2003, 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was here in Kirkland running around in and out of H-entryway in his flip-flops.”

Much of what has prompted these changes, according to Tom, stems from the kind of technological shifts that Zuckerberg himself has promoted. The early 2000s were host to the first signals of what Tom calls the “revolution.”

“And by revolution,” he says, “I mean the advent first of email, then of the cell phone, then of improved tweeting and twittering and Facebook.”

“It’s changed the mode of community,” he says. “It’s not that it has gone off elsewhere—it’s just gone in different directions.”

Specifically, Tom says, there is a much wider spread of exchange among students, in exchanges that he considers more “surface-level” than before—though not, he clarifies, in any sort of inferior way.

Verena adds that increased travel has done much to alter the House atmosphere since the turn of this century. Students are more connected to the world, but also travel more adeptly throughout it, she says. They bring these experiences back into the folds of the House community.

The Conleys joined Kirkland four years after Harvard had implemented complete randomization of the housing system; 2000 was the second year in which the entire Kirkland student body had been randomly assigned to the house. (Until the mid-’90s, recalled Dr. Benjamin I. Broder ’85 in a 2010 Crimson article, “Adams House was artsy, Eliot House was preppy, Kirkland House was jocky.”)

The Conleys both agree that Kirkland has, in general, benefited from the increase in racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity Harvard has promoted on University-wide levels. “That’s been an incredible improvement,” Verena says. “It’s been wonderful to see that over the years.”

But randomization, according to Tom, places much of the onus back onto the students who enter Kirkland and the other Houses. As freshmen prepare to enter their assigned House, they are met with possibilities—to get involved, to meet upperclassmen, to join House activities—that they can embrace or reject. The Conleys express regret that some do choose the latter path: They are quick to extol the benefits of their own immersion when they themselves were new, tentative initiates into the Kirkland community 13 years ago.

As House Masters, the Conleys see their jobs as advisers, parents, intellectual models, and cheerleaders as necessary, but not sufficient, for a House to function as a well-oiled machine. “It’s ultimately up to [the students] to produce the community amongst themselves,” Tom says, cocking his head to one side, the hint of a mischievous smile dancing on his lips. “And so,” he continues, “they rise to a challenge.”