Lewis says that this is a common problem in divying up limited space resources.

“Why don’t the people who are making the decisions contemplate the consequences?” he says. “The real question is why wasn’t it considered at the time the President and Fellows ceded the Rieman Center to the Radcliffe Institute.”

Dancers are not the only undergraduate constituency to lose out in the College’s jockeying with other schools for Harvard’s limited space.

Come 5:30 p.m. every evening, 47 out of the 67 Yard classrooms are turned over for use to the Division of Continuing Education.

Though Lewis says the decision to open Yard classroom space to the extension school fosters good community relations and earns FAS much needed money, it keeps students from using classrooms that would otherwise be available for extracurricular meetings and events.

Student actors, dancers, athletes, politicos and other group leaders have long griped that they don’t have the space they need, though most manage to make do with the basement corners they’ve been allowed to nest in.

“The space we have is small—it is really difficult for us to use it as is, but we have an office, which we are grateful to have,” writes Priscilla J. Orta ’05, president of the Latino cultural group RAZA. “At least it is someplace to keep our records and materials. If there were more of it though, it would be great... [to] hold meetings and the like in there or use it as a place where members could commune.”

Managing the Crunch

Amidst the river Houses lies a five-story “athletic center,” but the building’s competing responsibilities pit varsity and recreational athletes against each other.

Built in 1930 as the “Indoor Athletic Building,” the Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) was designed in a time when working out was not as central a part of undergraduates’ daily lives.

Even in the late-1980s, the exercise space was considered more a good spot to socialize, hang out and meet potential mates, with staff members estimating a daily sign-in of only about 200-300 users per day.

Today, however, the MAC sees roughly 7,000-10,000 visits a week—as many as 1,500 per day.

And the space is considered by undergraduates to be woefully inadequate.

This semester, the Undergraduate Council allocated nearly $13,000 for the renovation and expansion of House weight rooms in “a good first step to alleviate pressure” at the MAC, according to Chopra.

Adams House Master Sean Palfrey says his House needs more money from the administration for its weight room, as well as other House spaces.