<p>Harvard dorms range widely, and none have in-room cable. But I don't know of any H students who are TV-addicted or have much time for TV.</p>
<p>Hiding something? Indeed. Most H tour guides don't tell you not to rub the John Harvard statue's foot, as do hundreds of tourists a day. You shouldn't rub it because . . . well, just don't rub the thing. We'll leave it at that.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Yeah, and don't sit in Ben Franklin's lap on the park bench statue at Penn.</p>
<p>When we toured with D2 last summer our tour guide, to her credit, warned us not to touch John Harvard's foot. Five years earlier when we took the same tour with D1, not only were we not warned, we were actually <em>encouraged</em> to rub the foot.</p>
<p>And here's a quote from Yale Daily News about Woolsey's foot (apparently, Yale crew never lost when Woolsey was present):</p>
<p>"The biggest surprise for many students was the realization that no one actually visits the statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey for good luck, as they were told on their tours. </p>
<p>"I remember them telling me that lie about people rubbing that foot, but that’s totally not true. No one rubs the foot. It’s covered in bacteria."”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, John Harvard's left foot is covered in the beer consumed last night by freshman males, and more unfortunately, it's just as shiny as can be.</p>
<p>Since we are talking here about Ivy league dorm rooms and how small or shabby they might or might not be, I'll repeat a slightly updated post I put up on the Harvard board describing D1's freshman dorm experience:</p>
<p>Okay, here is my daughter's freshman housing story. This is her freshman dorm, Massachsetts Hall, built in 1720:</p>
<p>Her room was on the 4th floor, the one just to the lower left of the big clock. In the 1750s John Adams' old room was on the ground floor directly beneath hers. Adams took a class in Astronomy and used to lay out on the sloping roof of Mass Hall at night to study the stars to learn his constellations,</p>
<p>On Move-In Day we lugged all her stuff up there (44 steps up the stairs and 44 steps back down) and got it piled in the middle of the room, I was little dismayed at how small it was. And with the steep sloping ceiling, I could stand upright in only about 2/3rds of the room. I think it must have been servants' quarters back in colonial times. </p>
<p>There were two bedrooms for two girls with a bathroom shared with the other two girls across the hallway. But one of the two bedrooms was much larger than the other. The housing people had put one bed in the small room and the other bed and <em>both</em> desks in the larger room, the smaller room being too small to fit both a bed and a desk. But the girls themselves soon sorted this out into a better arrangement. They put both desks into the small room, making it a study room, and both beds into the larger room making it a sleeping and dressing room. Cramped? Yes, but it worked out fine.</p>
<p>And after she had been in school for a week or two, one of the occasional great benefits of living on Harvard campus became evident. One of the guys in her entry way who lived a floor beneath the girls was a virtuoso cellist and was at Harvard studying to become the next Yo-Yo Ma (and in fact the actual Yo-Yo Ma is his mentor). And sometimes when his roommate was out this guy would practice in his room instead of going to a music room. And the whole stairwell was then filled with the most beautiful cello music, wafting up from under their feet. It was so beautiful that the entire stairwell, normally populated with chatty, noisy college kids, would fall silent in listening.</p>
<p>What a way to kick off your college experience - living with great new friends and surrounded by both fascinating history and incredible beauty.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't know that business school alumni are so much more generous than everybody else.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Chicago</a> Gets Naming Gift, Becomes Booth School - BusinessWeek</p>
<p>Let's see if any social science and humanities alumni step up to the plate.</p>
