Plush Prefect Program

The well-intentioned but anemically funded Prefect Program attempts to do what sneaking into Adams House for dinner cannot: give first-years meaningful interactions with upperclassmen. Although living in Harvard Yard allows first years to form a meaningful community as a class, their lack of affiliation with a residential house impedes their ability to meet a substantial number of upperclassmen. This makes the Prefect Program all the more valuable, but its current budget—around $1 per student—is insufficient for the program to function optimally. Therefore, we welcome the University Hall’s announcement that the program’s budget will swell five-fold this year, and we hope that this raise portends both continued strong funding of the Prefect Program and an increased commitment to using upperclassmen as advisors to first-years.

Even with its tiny budget, the Prefect Program provides a variety of benefits to first-years. In their social coordinator mode, prefects help to unite entryways through weekly study breaks, brunches and other group activities. The program also picks up where the First Year Social Committee leaves off, organizing events such as last year’s Harvard Idol for the entire first-year class. But when students and prefects have tried to finagle extra funding—by pursuing small Undergraduate Council grants—for special first-year events, they have run into multiple bureaucratic barriers. Last year’s hugely successful Weld mixer and end-of-year South Yard study break were fully funded by the council, but only after students, prefects and a few dedicated council representatives submitted repeated grant applications. We hope and expect that the increase in funding to the Prefect Program will encourage more events like these to occur and that the hurdles to obtaining funds will be substantially lower.

Still, the most successful aspect of the prefect program is the passing down of informal advice from battle-tested upperclassmen. Upperclassmen are able to provide course suggestions and social tips to first-years in ways that most proctors can’t. While many of the Yard’s proctors currently provide meaningful advising to their entryways, we feel that prefects, on the whole, are more effective than proctors at dispensing counsel to greenhorn first-years. Our eventual hope is to see prefects, instead of proctors, living in first-year dorms in a part-time advising capacity, much like other schools—including several Ivy League colleges—already do.

It is in this vein that we reiterate our opposition to the Curricular Review committee’s recommendation that first-year entryways be affiliated with residential houses. The committee’s primary motivation in making this recommendation is that “students also receive a great deal of advice from one another, particularly from older students who can tell them about the experience of being in particular courses or concentrations.” Continuing to strengthen the Prefect Program, with the aim of someday converting it into a system of upperclass residential advisors, will accomplish this goal and preserve the best parts of Yard life as it is now: close bonding with other class members and the luxury to choose a blocking group across first-year dorms. We are happy to see Harvard often blazing its own trail of academic and extracurricular excellence, but a system of student residential advisors is one thing Harvard should pick up from its peer institutions.