At the turn of the 20th century, Harvard alumnus and Civil War veteran Major Henry Lee Higginson addressed the Harvard community on what he believed it most needed: a common space that all Harvard students could call their own. Higginson argued that the College exists “to furnish fit material for the building up of the Republic…good public and private citizens.” For this task, he reasoned, “equipment is needed, beside teachers, lectures, and books, the freest and fullest intercourse between students.” More than a century later, the major’s words still ring true.

Higginson’s grand gesture to Harvard was his 1899 gift of $150,000 for the creation of the Harvard Union, to be built on the site where the Barker Center stands today. The Union was constructed in 1902, and Higginson’s promise of “a house open to all Harvard men without restriction and in which they all stand equal” was for a time fulfilled. The New York Times concluded in 1913 that “the consensus of opinion seems to be that the Union is doing a great and much-needed work and that it is the most democratic influence in the university.” But despite its success, the Union’s financial situation deteriorated over the years and it fell into disuse by the late 1920s. In 1930, the space was converted into a freshman dining hall, which it remained until 1997, when it was turned into the Barker Center.

It is well beyond time for the Harvard community to reignite Higginson’s vision. An internal Harvard memo obtained in 2005 by the Boston Globe demonstrated that Harvard students are less happy with their experience than their peers at an elite group of 31 colleges known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, with frustration at a lack of an adequate social life and campus community playing a significant role in that dissatisfaction.

Fortunately, there is a movement afoot to restore the sense of unity to the Harvard community that Higginson championed. The Student Community Center Campaign, sponsored by the Undergraduate Council and endorsed by a broad coalition of students, student groups, and alumni, has taken great steps in the recent months to actualize this long-desired development for student life. It has drawn up building plans with a local architect, incorporated a non-profit foundation to oversee the project’s development, held high-level meetings with the administration, and convened a Campaign Advisory Council of student groups and a Board of Advisors of faculty and alumni. At the same time, thanks to significant negotiations, the SCCC on the verge of finalizing a deal for the purchase of 45 Mt. Auburn St., an extraordinarily well-located parcel of real estate with great potential for expansion.

In Harvard’s recent history, several stabs have been taken at this challenge, but previous top-down efforts to create a meaningful space for student life have been unsuccessful. The Loker Commons folded after great cost; the Queen’s Head Pub, though admirable, is inaccessible to the majority of undergraduates; and the Student Organization Center at Hilles is too removed to provide a social alternative adequate for the Harvard community. If you pressed a Harvard student to name the social center of campus life, a clear majority might embarrassingly cite Lamont Café, which is, after all, in a library.

The alternative path that the SCCC presents is a bottom-up, student-driven, independent movement to bring a successful conclusion to this lengthy process to establish a social life for Harvard students. What it promises is a genuine rallying point for the entire Harvard community: a centrally located space for student groups to meet and host events, for alumni to take the pulse of the campus, for continuous planned and impromptu artistic exhibitions. Perhaps most importantly, a locale for individual students to come together and create the kind of spontaneous interactions that make it such a privilege to attend a school with so many remarkable people in it.

Harvard has been mastering the art of educating exceptional young minds in the classroom for nearly four centuries now, but it has only begun the process of integrating an extremely diverse collection of students—from different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic classes—fairly recently, so work remains to be done. This drive for an independent, student-driven, fully inclusive, gender-neutral community center offers an opportunity for Harvard to continue its natural evolution, to continue its task of producing the best possible women and men to serve our republic. As Higginson put it in 1901, remembering his many classmates and comrades who had labored silently “in the background” to build up our university: “Our new house is built in the belief that here also will dwell this same spirit of democracy side by side with the spirit of true comradeship, friendship; but to-day this house is a mere shell, a body into which you, Harvard students, and you alone can breathe life and then by a constant and generous use of it educate yourselves and each other.”

As daunting as the challenge may appear, it behooves the Harvard community to seize the opportunity before us and thereby make the most of our own educations by breathing life back into the major’s vision of an inclusive, democratic common space that all Harvard students can call their own.


Mike L. Zuckerman is a second-semester junior and social studies concentrator in Lowell House and a director of the Student Outreach Committee of the Student Community Center Campaign.