Harvard dancers meet in a dorm room to write letters to prominent alumni in the arts, asking them to send letters to the administration supporting efforts to get more school space for dance classes and rehearsals.

On September 12, the College announced its decision to convert a Quad basketball court into a new dance center, angering many Quad residents, some already upset at a lack of recreational space.

Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 accused College administrators of trying to “trick” Quad students by taking away space without their consent.

But there was little he or anyone else could do. What few realized at the time was that a small group of dancers, working behind the scenes, had carefully and methodically won over top administrators to their cause over a year long period.

Armed with fact-filled binders, media savvy and a finely-tuned pitch, the group of six took a once-obscure issue—the impending loss of dance space—and made finding a new dance center one of the College’s top priorities.

In the process, they may have set a new precedent for how to get something done at University President Lawrence H. Summers’ Harvard.

“They made me realize with their numbers and with their stories how important dance was to a large part of the Harvard community,” Summers wrote in a statement. “They modelled effective student advocacy.”

Losing Space

In December 2002, five undergraduate dancers—Anne T. Hilby ’05, Rebecca J. Alaly ’04-’05, Adrienne M. Minster ’04, Anna K. Weiss ’03 and Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03—along with Business School student Elizabeth Darst ’00—sat down in Summers’ office and handed him a 100-page binder filled with charts and statistics demonstrating why dance needs a home at Harvard.

The group had prepared for weeks for the meeting, and had even assigned each other certain lines to recite to Summers.

Summers said the dancers’ presentation “was as thorough and thoughtful as any I have received at Harvard.”

Playing to Summers was a prime goal of the dancers’ strategy.

“We know that President Summers responds to excellence,” Alaly says. “We needed to show him what dance at Harvard has achieved. He’s also an economist, so we included several numbers and statistics.”

Summers’ endorsement of their plan represents a striking turnaround from a few years ago when it wasn’t apparent that many at the College knew or cared that the historic center of dance at Harvard—the Rieman Center—would be turned over to Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2005.

When Harvard merged with Radcliffe in 1999, they turned over the old gymnasium to be used as a conference room by the Institute.

During her sophomore year, Minster remembered the lease and became concerned with the future of Rieman.