1,600 First Dates

Harvard Yard Move-ins, then and now

Early-morning moving-in scenes, Harvard Yard, August 25, 2015Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC
Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC
Photograph by Harvard Magazine/JC

With a few hours to kill while visiting Cambridge this summer, I dropped by a favorite place, the University Archives. (The hushed voices and the sign-in process, which includes buzzing into the reading room twice, always make me feel like I’m in on some sort of secret.) The pleasant summer weather reminded me of the first days of freshman year—Move-in, Opening Days (a rebranded version of Freshman Week), and Convocation—and given that I’d soon be going through all those rituals again, this time in my role as a “Peer Advising Fellow” (PAF) helping freshmen move in and acclimatize, I decided I’d explore how a freshman moved in in years past.

The first account I found was that of Morrill Wyman, a member of the class of 1833. And if the relative certainty that I won’t perish from consumption isn’t a good enough reason to appreciate living in the twenty-first century, what I learned made me glad not to be a nineteenth-century undergraduate.

When Wyman arrived in Cambridge 186 years ago, he did not meet an enthusiastic proctor flanked by gung-ho peer advisers eager to smooth his transition to Cambridge. Instead, he faced nine hours of grueling entrance exams in University Hall. After being tested on Greek poetry and prose, Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics, ancient and modern geography, “Greek Testaments,” Cicero’s orations, Lacroix’s Arithmetic, Latin composition, and algebra, he was made to wait for three hours while his exams were graded. (Anyone interested can find a copy of a later iteration of the devilishly tricky entrance exam here.) At around 9:30 p.m., he was informed in front of the rest of his examination group that he was in as long as he could pass a remedial algebra exam before the end of winter vacation.

Wyman moved into his dorm room four days after earning admission. Today’s freshmen will move in either four or eight months after they’ve received their offer, depending on whether they were admitted during the early or the regular round. (For members of the “Z-list,” those admitted on the condition they take a gap year first, the time till Move-in stretches to more than a year.)

The Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO) is the head of the Harvard hydra ultimately responsible for Move-in. (Like the Board of Freshman Advisers, focused exclusively on the first-year experience, the office resulted from the College’s residential-housing reform in the 1930s.) The current dean of freshmen, Thomas Dingman ’67, and his FDO colleagues have spent the summer coordinating logistics, planning the orientation program, and engaging in the painstaking process of hand-matching some 1,600 students into rooming groups based on compatibility questionnaires. This combination of careful planning and annual reassessments of efficiency means there is little doubt that the objectives of move-in day will be achieved: eventually 1,600 freshmen will be lying snug in their beds, at once excited and horrified about the next four years.

The management of cars in Harvard Yard, masses of bedding and boxes, and shabby dorm furniture is not the challenge. The hard part of Move-in is deciding how to craft the freshmen’s first interactions with their new home. Harvard finds itself faced with challenges remarkably similar to those of a boy from the 1950s taking a girl on her first date: mollifying her parents and balancing the desire to seem impressive with the desire to seem approachable.

Meet the parents

For many of Harvard’s peer institutions, getting the parents out is much harder than getting the kids in, and a 2011 Atlantic article outlined some of the tweaks to tradition employed in that attempt. The University of Chicago chose to add another bagpipe processional at the end of opening ceremonies to mark the parents’ exit from the proceedings. The University of Vermont apparently has a group of “parent bouncers” created just for move-in day. Dean Dingman and the FDO claim that there are no “parent bouncers” or bagpipe-like plots to hurry parents out the door at Harvard, but the first-years’ student handbook contains a gentle reminder (with helpful bolding of key terms) that parents “find it best” to leave before 7 p.m. on move-in day.

It’s understandable that parents would be a tad clingy. Move-in is not just a logistical headache; it’s an emotional one as well. The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the class of 2018, for example, stated that 85.1 percent of the class are either the oldest or the youngest child in their families: either the first child leaving for college or the last child out of the house, or—in the case of only children—both.

Many freshmen, meanwhile, are facing the most drastic lifestyle change in their young lives thus far. Having been inundated with questions about college since around the time they hit puberty (surely the only topic of conversation that extended family feel comfortable engaging in with a teenager), there’s a sense that they’re embarking on something grand and important. They’ve heard the phrase “best four years of your life” more times than they can count. The double-barreled strain of logistical stress and emotional weight would be difficult even without the added burden of Boston’s charmingly oppressive August climate.

Sadly, statistics on tears shed on move-in day go unrecorded, but from personal and anecdotal evidence I can confidently say there are quite a few, though it’s handicapped toward the parental side.

An account from the October 6, 1969, issue of this magazine captures the scene and the attempts to manage peer and parental interactions:

There can’t be anything worse than meeting your roommate when your mother’s crying and calling you her little boy and your father’s saying, “When I was [a student]....” But then you realize his parents are doing the same thing. Two sheepish smiles and a few mumbled obscenities and you’ve already got something in common.

The date

As the parents slowly disperse, Harvard takes over with an orientation program geared simultaneously toward putting students at ease and impressing them with the history and prestige of their new home.

Arriving on campus bright-eyed and enthusiastic, an innocent freshman immediately becomes a member of an “entryway,” a pod of adjacent rooms that constitute 30 to 40 students under the tutelage of a proctor (supervised and chosen by the FDO) aided by a team of three to four PAFs. The PAF/proctor teams (assisted further by nonresident advisers: faculty and staff members and graduate students) are meant to make the freshmen feel more at home in their new residence and help untangle the Gordian knot of Harvardian acronyms and course requirements.

Many of the opening-week activities offered by the FDO are similarly geared toward easing the freshmen into the Harvard community. Between August 25 and August 31 this year, freshmen will have no fewer than 14 opportunities to participate in Zumba®, jogging, pilates, yoga, and other communal exercise schemes with their new classmates. Dorm socials and entryway bonding events are also plentiful.

Though it’s easy to assume that an era more focused on informality and self-esteem might yield an opening week more attuned than Morrill Wyman’s was to comforting the freshmen, the FDO maintains a few rituals that add a healthy dose of Harvardian braggadocio and intimidation to the mix. In 2009 the office replaced the “opening exercises” portion of Move-in with a more formal “Freshman Convocation.” According to Katie Steele, director for freshman programming at the FDO, the decision was made after staff members decided, “We can do this [Move-in] in a more Harvard way.”  Convocation “marks your official start as a member of the Harvard community and will introduce you to the history, values, and future of America’s oldest institution of higher education,” according to this year’s “Opening Days” booklet. 

To this end there are, in addition to Convocation, thrice-daily Harvard History tours and a mandatory talk about the liberal arts. One of the speakers at last year’s liberal-arts events, Bass professor of English Louis Menand, spoke about the origins of the General Education program at Harvard in a talk that reached back to President Eliot and mentioned his role as a sculptor of higher education in the United States. (Menand is known to say that Harvard is unique in its love for talking about itself, and indeed, Stanford, Harvard’s tanned cousin from the West Coast, boasts no Stanford history events in its orientation activities; even at Yale, no “Historic Yale Tour” appears in the orientation schedule.)

It’s in these moments of navel gazing that Harvard’s institutional muscle-flexing and desire to make an impression peek out from behind the community-building exercises that characterize the rest of opening days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For all Harvard’s fraught associations with privilege, influence, and exclusion, people who choose Harvard choose it for a reason. Even if they’re intimidated by the place or think the institution has perpetuated societally unjust systems, they’re attracted to it.

My job as a PAF, like Dean Dingman’s job, like the job of hundreds of people dedicated to freshman advising, is to somehow find that winning balance of historical pride and a welcoming demeanor—a task made exceedingly difficult, almost Sisyphean, by the fact that there’s a different ideal balance for each of the 1,600 incoming freshmen. Yet despite the near-impossibility of getting it right for every student, it’s so easy to believe that one more Zumba® class, one more Harvard History tour, a few extra exclamation points in an e-mail, and a wider smile when I meet my advisees might make all the difference.

 C. Ramsey Fahs  ’18 is a gung-ho peer adviser.

Read more articles by: C. Ramsey Fahs

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