Kiely spoke only briefly before the crowd walked the few feet into the Adams dining hall for a festive meal--the dining hall that he led the charge to renovate.
He said there was no other place at Harvard he would rather see bear the Kiely name than the conservatory.
The glass-ceilinged private dining hall was also his brainchild: a place on campus that people could go to talk to one another.
There are too many places in the world, Kiely said, where people communicate only in four-letter words in between video games.
Still, in his speech, he poked fun at the rakishness his House had often reveled in.
"If you don't fasten everything to the wall so it can't be lifted," he said, referring to the honorific items in the Kiely Conservatory, "all this will be gone within a year."