Boston, Mass.

March 17, 2001

Graduate Students Need Housing Too

To the editors:

In "Downsize the Tutors" (Opinion, March 14), Scott A. Resnick describes the overcrowding in undergraduate Houses and suggests that decreasing the number of resident tutors would free up valuable space. Indeed it would, but it would throw those tutors into the extremely-overburdened graduate student housing pool.

Graduate student housing at Harvard is even more strained than that for undergraduates; currently, only one in four applicants can get into University-owned housing (apartments), and a small fraction live in the few dormitory rooms. There are over 3,000 students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) alone, most of whom teach and research on the Cambridge campus, and we compete for dormitory and University-owned housing with students at all of Harvard's graduate schools. If tossed into an already overburdened, hideously expensive housing market, GSAS students will be forced to live farther and farther away from campus. This will have a negative impact on their own work, as well as on the work they do for undergraduates--they will not be as available for meetings outside of classes, for example.

The University faces a severe housing shortage for both its undergraduate and graduate populations. Long-term plans are in the works, and we look forward to the day when any graduate student who wants to can live in a University housing complex. However, we understand that realistically, this day will be a long time coming. Resnick makes a good point that undergraduate housing space is at a premium, but reducing the number of resident tutors simply hurts another important group of students on the Cambridge campus.