Loker Commons, the closest Harvard has to a student center, underscores the College’s often inefficient and clumsy use of available space.

A pair of pool tables, two dozen computers, a free jukebox, a “lite-brite” LED announcement board, a smattering of culinary offerings from burgers to bubble tea, a TV labeled for “ad hoc” use and a math help station bombard the student who descends the granite steps to the basement of Harvard’s cathedral-like Memorial Hall.

This motley assortment of social and academic diversions—the product of $25 million and a decade of continuous renovations—is as close as it gets to a student center at Harvard.

The facility, known as Loker Commons, was Harvard’s attempted solution to a crisis created in 1994 when it decided to centralize its scattered humanities departments.

Despite undergraduate protests, the Freshman Union—previously the largest student social space on campus and home to a dining hall, a black box theater, a large event room, several smaller meeting rooms and music practice spaces—was razed to make way for the Barker Center for the Humanities.

Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 calls Loker—a space that had formerly housed a “Psycho Acoustic Laboratory” which conducted secret military research, the labs of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner and assorted student offices—an ultimate failure on the part of the administration, an attempt to do too much in too small a space.

“It can’t be everything, so it’s nothing,” Chopra says. “What is this thing?”

College administrators have tried for years to respond to students clamoring for more space with creative—though sometimes clumsy—solutions, from building Loker to allowing a professional theater troupe to colonize one of the best stages on campus.

Despite these efforts, students complain that the already inadequate amount of social and extracurricular space on campus is steadily shrinking.

In part, this problem stems from the College’s position as one of many Harvard constituencies wrangling for the limited space available in Cambridge’s urban environment.

“A lot of the problems, it’s not even clear that money can solve them,” says Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68.

When pitted against pedagogical, administrative and research needs, undergraduates often lose out. The past quarter century has seen building after building taken away from student activities and converted into research and academic facilities.

And even the limited space dedicated to student use is inefficiently managed.

While some say small steps—like allocating space more efficiently and centralizing scheduling—could alleviate the problem on a short-term basis, a long-term solution for the “space crunch” will likely require a more comprehensive review of available facilities and drastic reconfigurations of existing buildings.

With one or more faculties almost certain to move to the University’s new campus in Allston, significant space will become available on this side of the river.

But if the historic trend of prioritizing research needs continues, undergraduates may not reap the benefits of this exodus.