Dudley’s Closure Is a Loss for Harvard’s Culture

While Harvard’s brochures offer a kaleidoscope of student life, the loss of the Dudley Co-op leaves campus a shade more monochrome.

Amid the restructuring of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s administration has decided to phase out the Dudley Community and close the Dudley Co-op at the end of this academic year. To justify the closure, Harvard College Dean David J. Deming cited waning student interest in the residential space.

For decades, the Co-op served students who felt otherwise alienated at Harvard. International students, military veterans, and LGBTQ+ students alike have found a home in the tight-knit living space — not to mention an affordable alternative to the Houses.

Given the political and cultural value it offered, Dudley’s dwindling occupancy should concern anyone who values a campus with room for unconventional ways of living. Going so far as to close the Co-op turns a temporary student retreat from counterculture into a permanent narrowing of the campus experience.

The closure exposes a tension at the heart of contemporary Harvard: The diversity of backgrounds students bring to Harvard does not always match the diversity of the lives they lead once on campus. The Co-op’s declining membership — housing 16 in a space built for 32 — suggests our campus is increasingly drawn toward a common mold.

But if the school is getting less diverse in experience, Harvard should be soul-searching instead of boarding up the unique corners of campus.

In part, that’s because closing Dudley cuts against the College’s professed commitment to intellectual vitality. Dudley has historically been a site of activism and progressive politics, enacting living practices of collective self-governance by sharing labor and maintaining a community together. The closure deprives students of a place to put their politics into practice — and their peers a chance to learn from it.

This retreat is all the more disappointing because it lands on a quieter Harvard: The school has tightened the bounds on acceptable speech and left a lasting chill over protest. The College has also closed both the Office of BGLTQ Student Life and Women’s Center and reduced staffing in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.

Together, these changes suggest an administration increasingly willing to let smaller spaces of support, especially those associated with marginalized students, disappear. Closing Dudley further shrinks the space available for student dissent and nonconformity.

And given a moment of technological incursion — phones out as we socialize, artificial intelligence out as we write — the College should be looking for ways to promote the kinds of inefficiencies inherent to cooperative living. Dudley embodied a different pace of life at Harvard by requiring the slow work of chores and community cooking.

So while we celebrate that the Houses have become more inclusive over the years to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse student population, that can’t negate the value Dudley brings to campus.

We hope that following its closure, Harvard listens to student input and honors the space by repurposing it to serve the communities it was meant to serve. The College should make the Co-op a community space for students with needs that might be less common within the traditional House system.

Otherwise, future students will know that a decidedly countercultural space once existed on this campus only by its Wikipedia page.

Regardless, the Co-op has one more year left, and its dinners are still open to Harvard undergraduates.

We’ll see you there.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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