But if his antics meant anything, they were a salient indication that it was okay to break the mold--if the Loker professor of English could do it, so too could anyone else.

"I wasn't out to break the rules, but I didn't think my life was driven by them," Kiely says.

For Chideya, that message was clear: "In Adams House, you had a lot of latitude to create your own persona," she says. "He allowed us to get crazy--but in safe ways. He understood that we were experimenting."

Leaving No Legacy?

But even after a quarter century at the helm of Adams House, Kiely is clearly uncomfortable with the notion that he is responsible for any particular House "legacy."

There can be no question, however, that he leaves a physical legacy at Adams--the most obvious being the gloriously renovated dining hall, a project that was completed under his direction. Few know that it was Kiely who also spent years fighting vigorously for the glass-ceilinged private dining hall next door. After several architects, Kiely finally found one who thought the challenge of enclosing the space in between two Adams structures was doable.

But sitting at a corner table in the room that he's responsible for creating, the silver-haired Kiely, with only a tie to complement his black shirt and jeans, bristles at the suggestion that he is responsible for the character that haunts Adams House from its days before randomization.

"I would feel it would be exaggerating to take too much credit," Kiely says. "Any master who thinks he has the ability to construct pyramids of legacy--I don't buy it."