Privacy is hard to come by on campus. The Dean of Students Office warns first-years that “Very few singles are available” in the Yard. In some houses, even seniors might have to share a bedroom. Outside of residential life, students share classes in lecture halls, meals in dining halls, and parties in the rarefied halls of final clubs. Even in libraries, bastions of silent personal study, patrons sit at communal tables in large reading rooms. At Harvard, lack of privacy is simply a fact of life.
Students employ a number of strategies to combat the scarcity of privacy, from shamelessly hogging rooms in Cabot or the SEC to setting strict boundaries with roommates. Sadly, these tactics do not always work, and their failure can create more stress. Roommate arguments are common enough that first-year proctors require written agreements from suites. We have all experienced the exasperation of walking down a row of private cubicles only to find them all occupied.
As is often seen when demand exceeds supply, some turn to crime. We laugh at the idea of being sexiled, even though it is essentially the theft of privacy. Sexile translates to “I want to get laid more than I want to respect your right to your space, so I will take your portion of our shared space for myself.”
Increasing supply is one option to deal with scarcity. A friend of mine wanted her own kitchen, so she rented an off-campus apartment. This option might make sense for introverts, but it involves a disconnect from campus culture that some consider unacceptable. Plus, living off campus requires time, work, and money that not every student has. Even so, there is precedent for this choice: in earlier times, wealthier students lived in privately-run halls, while only the poorest students had rooms in Harvard Yard.
Many of these halls became part of Adams House as part of a greater shift towards making house life a quintessential part of the Harvard experience. For those who refuse to leave campus, the only remaining solution to the dearth of privacy is to reduce the demand for it in the first place. This option is much more controversial than increasing supply, but it may be a necessary compromise. We put up with sexilic theft because it is better than the alternative: walking in on your roommate and their paramour (or, worse, paramours).
Sexile aside, much of what we appreciate about privacy is not the lack of other bodies, but rather what Judge Raymond Kethledge, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and author of Lead Yourself First, calls “a lack of input from other minds.” We aren’t opposed to seeing people; we just don’t want to interact with them.
In fact, Kethledge argues that today, privacy and solitude are completely unrelated concepts. Privacy, he says, is being physically alone; solitude is feeling mentally alone. He is vocal about his dislike of smartphones, going so far as to say that they are the primary enemy of those who seek solitude. Going on Facebook—or, this issue being what it is, Tinder—can turn a private retreat into full-on public engagement rather than focused self-reflection.
On the other hand, it is possible to be alone even in the midst of a crowd. Kethledge mentions a time when, on a visit to Harvard, he found himself having to walk across a large chunk of campus. He took this not as an annoyance, but as an opportunity. Personally, I often do Bible study and similar solitary activities on the T. The presence of other people doesn’t bother me because they aren’t providing input. I may not be alone, but I have solitude.
Confusing privacy and solitude can make both less effective. For instance, those of us who isolate ourselves during personal struggles are ignoring that it’s possible to reject solitude while maintaining privacy. Talking to a friend whom they can trust to preserve the privacy of their concerns might be a healthier way of dealing with personal challenges. Once we can view “being alone” and “feeling alone” on two separate axes, we can be mindful about which one we need.
Thinking this way requires a certain amount of self-confidence. It’s difficult to feel alone in public if you are worried about what strangers are thinking about you. They might not be talking, but you are still focused on the imagined input of their minds. The only solution I have found for this is to notice how engrossed other people are in their own inner lives, in their phones, or in their own practice of solitude. It’s liberating to realize that you have the privacy to think and feel whatever you want.
While privacy is certainly a scarce resource on Harvard’s campus, that might not be such a bad thing. The next time you are looking for somewhere private, or lamenting your inability to find one, ask yourself if you are actually looking for the experience of solitude instead. If so, seek it out. It will be more satisfying for you, free up privacy for those who need it at that moment, and build up more goodwill for when you inevitably end up needing to kick someone out of a study room.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) would like his editor to leave him alone now, please.