Broadfoot makes hourly checks throughout the course of the night to make sure students and their possessions are safe.
He said that, contrary to popular belief, there is not just one type of student who feels compelled to study overnight in the library.
“I get to see what students are studying, because I have to check the bags,” Broadfoot says. “I see what comes in and goes out, and it seems that every kind of student comes in here to make use of the long hours.”
Broadfoot, who has worked at Cabot for six reading periods, says he has seen fewer sleeping bags than usual this year, but more fuzzy slippers.
“I feel badly for the students who just fall asleep,” Broadfoot says as he reaches to reshelve a book on Penguin biology. “They come here wanting to study but their bodies just fail them.”
“I don’t understand why students stay up all night studying anyway. I think a good night’s sleep is far more useful,” he continues.
The End of the Night
There are about 30 students in the library at 1 a.m., many who have trekked to the Science Center after Lamont Library closed at 12:45.
By 3 a.m. most have gone home, leaving about a dozen students scattered between the library’s three floors.
They make trips to and from the bathroom with toothbrushes in tow, check their e-mail and stretch. As the night goes on, they take brief naps sprawled across tables in study rooms.
At 5:30 a.m. yesterday, Jeremy P. Gallen ’05 estimated that he had not left the Science Center building for 15 hours.
“I was working in the [computer] lab downstairs for a while, then I ate in the Greenhouse, and now I’m here,” he said.
Gallen, a religion concentrator who was working on a paper on aesthetics, said the stress of the library can get to be too much. He said he had seen a girl start crying in the library earlier in the evening.
“She just came up here and started wailing. She was on the verge of hysteria. My heart reached out to her,” he said.
As dawn breaks over Canaday, the sleepover ends. Students pack up their books, put on their shoes, and head out into the cold.
—Staff writer Rebecca D. O’Brien can be reached at robrien@fas.harvard.edu.