On Thursday, November 6, 2025, student life at Harvard underwent its greatest change yet. An email titled “Laundry and Student Fees,” sent out by Harvard’s very own Dean Deming, detailed a transition to free laundry for all Harvard College students effective in the new year. The email went on to explain that the loss of revenue from laundry machines would be refinanced via the once-optional $450/yr “Student Activities Fee,” but almost nobody read that far. Students campus-wide rejoiced in the news — Our prayers have been answered, they said! No more $3.50 loads, they said! — but little did anyone know what was to come.

The Harvard Business School’s blog defines the economic concept of the tragedy of the commons as “a situation in which individuals with access to a public resource — also called a common — act in their own interest and, in doing so, ultimately deplete the resource.” Just ask any wannabe finance bro in Ec10 — it’s a real problem. It’s led to deforestation, overfishing, and congested city roads that are to blame for your shuttle always running 15 minutes late. Now, it’s hit Harvard’s campus. Hard.

See, free laundry sounds great, until it isn’t. For what is free laundry but a “public resource” — a shared service students are free to utilize at no marginal cost? Again, consult your local finance bro for more information. And what is a Harvard student but a rational economic thinker, poised to act purely in his/her own interest? Put the two together, and you get what has quickly become Cambridge’s most pressing issue: laundry rooms are a no-man’s-land.

Forget any civil interaction you may have had in a laundry room last semester, or any sympathetic smile you may have shared with a stranger suffering from technical difficulties (who actually knows their One Tap Away password!?). Now, it’s every man for himself. In all fairness, I cannot speak for every laundry room on campus, but I will comment on my motherland and the front line of this ongoing battle: Canaday. Once a mecca of “We should get a meal sometime!” and various other obligatory freshman pleasantries, it is now a microcosm of true anarchy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) rundown of what has happened to our once-beloved laundry room since so-called Laundrygate:

Picture this: a graveyard of washers — three out of ten functioning for 257 residents. Discarded Tide Pods line the floors. Half-finished loads huddle unclaimed in every corner. Clothes sprawled everywhere. The lint screens? Yeah, those haven’t been cleared in months. Actually, I’m not sure that pricing changes can be blamed for this one. You have to do this, people. Freshmen are ruthless — arrive a minute late to pick up your laundry, and you can kiss those pajamas your mom got you for Christmas goodbye.

All this to say, our incentives aren’t aligned. What reason does anybody have not to do a whole load for just one sock? It’s not like it’ll cost anything. (Save your dignity, of course). Or to not take a fellow Canadayan’s load out of the machine mid-cycle? C’mon, where’s the Oak Yard allegiance?! After all, anyone can easily run another load on Harvard’s dime. And, obviously, that one sock needs to go in the machine. Indeed, what could possibly be Harvard’s motivation to fix those seven broken machines? It’s strictly a downside for them; there’s no additional money to be made from a functioning machine.

This isn’t necessarily a call for re-privatized laundry, but it is a plea for common decency. Seriously, I should not lose nine socks in a singular wash. (Yes, that happened to me.) And it could just as easily happen to you. It’s totally acceptable to take someone else’s laundry out of the machine *after* it has finished running. However, it most certainly isn’t to throw said laundry onto the bare Canaday basement floor (iykyk). Or to maliciously pause an unassuming victim’s dryer. Or to do three loads when you know you could have consolidated to one.

As Dean Straker so eloquently titled an email sent out to the class of 2029 this past Tuesday, Flyby implores you to please “Keep Our Laundry Rooms Clean.” If you felt personally targeted by Straker’s email — calling out freshman laundry rooms’ state of “significant disarray” and featuring photo receipts to prove it — perhaps it’s time to heed her guidance and start, you know, acting with some common sense. “Wipe up any spills and dispose of trash in the appropriate bins?” What are we, five?

Finally, a word of warning: If you’re an upperclassman thinking you couldn’t possibly get wrapped up in any of this, they’re threatening to close down freshman laundry rooms if things don’t start to pick up (pun intended). And in that case, you’re next, Adams.

Do better, Harvard.