A fantastically large bird, nameless and blue, pops out of the bushes and flies across the water. Luckily, I live in Winthrop House, so I could walk right out of my own courtyard to this perfect bench by the river moments before, barefoot if I wished.
Winthrop is clearly protagonist-coded, a prominent House in the pantheon of Harvard—though all Houses are powerful, uniquely compelling characters, and essential to our shared strength. (A small black bird with orange shoulder-flames lands on the bush in front of me, cheeping its original voice, differently and equally beautiful to the big bird before.) But what is Winthrop’s role? What does Winthrop represent? And—especially given current discourse about the weight of history, and the clouded, chiaroscuro significance of Winthrop’s name—what might Winthrop mean?
I’ve been in Winthrop longer than just about anyone, besides Goretti, who swipes us into the dining hall. On Housing Day 2017, in JFK’s old place in Weld, my friends and I jumped for joy to follow further in his footsteps when Winthrop stormed our dorm. We would be the first class to enter the newly-renovated Winthrop—it was by far the most desired House that year, and still, as always, remains in the top four. The Millennials who stormed our dorm had lived in the ‘Winn,’ but we, who they called Gen Z, would be the first to define the new Winthrop still wrapped in construction paper.
Three different faculty deans have come and gone from new Winthrop during these last eight years, after the Ron Sullivan controversy in 2019 led to a fascinating coup d’etat by the Winthrop tutors. Though I began my five-year leave of absence in Spring 2019, I kept visiting my friends in Winthrop—until March 2020, when we were all kicked off campus with a few days to pack. That was a wild time; as the world went crazy, all the rules of Harvard disappeared, and everyone tried to fit senior spring into a few days. On the last night before the end of the world, someone set up a pong table right in the center of Winthrop d-hall.
My sister came to Harvard with the Class of 2025, and in 2022, she too was blessed with Winthrop. So I visited often when I was in town, hitchhiking into the d-hall, saying hi to Goretti. These visits to share food with friends and family kept me tethered to this place, reminded me that this is my home, one of the best homes I’ve ever known. And now, here I am, home again, finishing my senior year with my sister and all the wonderful friends I’ve made with this generation of Harvard students and Winthropians. This is why I care about what Winthrop means.
Besides the obvious—lions, the red and black, the general Gryffindor vibe, the fact that we win the intramural Straus Cup more often than anyone and just did it again—I believe three core themes define Winthrop.
The first is, of course, the river. Everyone wants a River House, but Winthrop is the River House. It stretches across the choicest green of the riverfront, the main grass we all cover in picnic blankets and sundresses when the spring sun comes out. Harvardians of all stripes walk through our open courtyard to reach the river, from green path to green freedom. This is essential to our sense of living in a healthy, walkable neighborhood with access to nature—our sense of Harvard as a tasteful old estate, a humane and beautiful garden.
The Charles River is the best place at Harvard. It’s the one part of campus that reminds us we’re still in nature, still a part of the land, still flowing in the great river of evolution that widens beyond our merely human world. We go there to feel moments of peace, to smoke, to walk, to reset from the craziness of campus life. The Lowell courtyard is lovely, but I’d rather choose immediate river access. As someone who’s spent four years living in nature out of my converted school bus, I needed the river this year more than ever to feel at home in the natural world of Massachusetts.
To truly embrace this strength, though, Winthrop must make the main courtyard gate swipe-access, so that Winthropians and other students can more easily get to the river and back at night. The current lack of swipe provides no safety benefit besides security theater, and it forces hundreds of students to walk an ugly concrete path far out of their way just to get to the river. This unnecessarily locked gate betrays the essence of Winthrop nightly.
In Standish Courtyard last night, two baby bunnies ran by my bench and scurried through the space below the gates. There is more life around Winthrop than any other House, because we open to the widest reach of the river.
Secondly, Winthrop is the most dialectical house, due to its unique founding; when President Lowell designed the House system in the 1930s, he combined the existing Gore and Standish halls into one new house, a binary star system composed of two buildings with different personalities. Gore is larger, more utilitarian, and more communal with its dining hall, gym, and essential community amenities—it was once considered one of Harvard’s most beautiful bits of architecture. Standish, the building I love most, has its own vibe—more academic, alternative, homely, with the Standish Library, the arts room, and the long basement common space.
Both are essential, but the ‘center’ of Winthrop is neither. The other core Houses that Lowell built have a tighter sense of center, whereas Winthrop’s center is the open courtyard between its two buildings—an area of unbounded betweenness that holds space for conversation as we cross. (Two older women, up the path, are looking at a bird. When they walk by my bench, they’re talking about it. “The black bird with the orange flames on its shoulders!” I say. “Yes!” they say, excited. “And yellow underneath when they open their wings!” I hadn’t noticed that. We get to talking.) Like any dialectic, this creates a whole gestalt that is larger than and other than the sum of its parts. Over time—innumerable collisions—the river widens.
Diversity accelerates dialectics. Essential to what Winthrop means is that it was the first House really open to Catholics and Jews; this meant a lot in the first half of the twentieth century, at a Harvard dominated by old WASPs and defined by spheres of exclusion. Franklin D. Roosevelt ’03 lived in the luxurious Gold Coast dorms, back before Adams House existed. John F. Kennedy ’40 is the College’s only U.S. President to come of age in the House system. A damned Irish Catholic like me, he was not the ‘right sort’ for Eliot or Lowell—but he and his brothers belonged in the open gates of Winthrop.
Once you notice the theme of dialectics at Winthrop, you start seeing it everywhere. A conversation emerges between the two gates to the main courtyard. Between American literature on the inside wall of the library and British literature on the outside wall. Between civilization and nature across the road. Between the two faculty deans, Steve and Kiran, both active presences in House life. Between my sister in Gore and myself in Standish. Between Massachusetts Bay Colony, represented by John Winthrop, and Plymouth Colony, represented by Miles Standish—the modern state of Massachusetts is a sort of symbiogenesis. Boston imperially absorbed Plymouth like an endosymbiotic mitochondria: Wampanoag land, where I grew up, joined together with Massachusett land, where I go to school.
Of course, this reminds us of the dialectic most salient to current discourse about what Winthrop means: the dialectic between the past and the present. For, as has been discussed at length in the Independent, Crimson, and Winthrop’s website, the first John Winthrop was responsible not only for founding Boston but for the enslavement of Native Americans, while the second John Winthrop was not only America’s first astronomer, but also a keeper of African slaves. Some student groups have made an effort to ‘dename’ Winthrop House as a way of symbolically rejecting these historic crimes, and this effort is understandable.
However, I assume denaming is unlikely to happen; after all, the same Harvard committee reviewing the denaming request chose to keep the name of the Sackler Building, named after a family personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of ruined lives and deaths by opioid addiction—perpetrators of much more recent crimes in a more immediately shared moral context. Furthermore, the Sackler Building wasn’t ever anybody’s home, but to thousands of Winthrop alumni, the word Winthrop means home more than anything else. It connects us to shared memories and one another. If the name stays, then the conversation we need to have is about meaning. Can we change and choose what we want words to mean? Can we face the past while remaining free to become new again in the present?
I believe we can, and this brings us to the third defining theme of Winthrop: the blank slate. For much of Winthrop is, quite literally, a blank canvas: after its relatively recent renovation, new Winthrop often feels like a hotel with empty halls and long white walls. In these blank spaces, there is freedom and opportunity. Already, the deans are putting beautiful art up to fill the space, including art co-created by multiple Winthropians. I hope to see more dialectical art fill the blank space as years go by (especially collaborative poetry, which I enjoyed hosting in the Winthrop JCR). To be a blank slate means that the community here gets to shape Winthrop’s future together, in dialogue with one another.
W.E.B. Du Bois ’88 inherited the last name of a white slaveholder in the Bahamas who fathered Du Bois’s grandfather with one of his slaves. Yet, unlike Malcolm X, Du Bois kept his name, made it his own, made it new, made it emancipatory. Instead of capitulating to the weight of history, Du Bois decided to enter into courageous, productive dialogue with it. This is fitting for a man who knew what it was to see on both sides of ‘double-consciousness,’ who wrote that “[o]ne ever feels his two-ness.” He acknowledged the power of history while also recognizing the right of the present to change, to dawn again and again, a new world in the innocence of becoming.
When we interact with the past, it always takes place on the turf of the present, a turf that’s already drifted—a little space opens up, a crack of blankness across the surface of any story. Interaction itself generates novelty, freedom; the present emerges as the river flows, made of the past yet more than the past, fresh in the white foam at the very edge of history. A new day in May; an osprey dives into the river, catches a fish in the froth, and flies away.
The river, the dialectic, the blank space—Winthrop is an open gate symbolizing all three, symbolizing what it means to grow and yet stay the same, to be a container that must overflow itself. Forgive the metaphysics—there’s a girl in Winthrop who really likes Hegel.
To make healthy use of Winthrop’s past and widen the river of consciousness, there should be a statue dedicated to W.E.B. Du Bois in the Gore Courtyard and a statue for John Sassamon in the Standish Courtyard. John Sassamon was a Massachusett native who learned English at Harvard in the 1650s; as Professor Jill Lepore wrote in “The Name of War,” he worked with the original John Eliot to print works translating between English and Algonquian, fulfilling one of Harvard’s original aspirations. Sassamon was a key figure in the cross-cultural communication that tragically collapsed when his murder on Wampanoag land precipitated the King Philip’s War, tearing New England apart in what was essentially the first war along ‘racial’ lines in its history. Yet his story, and the hope of communication across difference, are still worth celebrating despite all our tragic failures. We can choose dialogue with this past, too.
To celebrate Du Bois and Sassamon in a house called Winthrop is not a contradiction, but a conversation. Denaming Winthrop would weaken, not increase, our ability to have a productive conversation with history. The true use of discourse comes not from obscuring it, but from bringing it into contrast. On his way to found Boston, John Winthrop famously said “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” And, as it says in the original Bible verse, “A city on a hill cannot be hidden.”
I will miss Winthrop. I’ve been writing this piece for weeks; I’m now in dialogue with my past self. Today, on the same bench, I saw a great blue heron, rare but alive around here. I wonder if it’s the same fantastic bird I saw last time, the one I didn’t have a name for; or, perhaps, it’s different. A chip bag floats slowly towards the shore; I pick up a stick, reach out, and snag the soggy garbage. This has happened before, exactly here, at another time, with another chip bag. I walk someone else’s trash to the can and toss it, on behalf of the river. I leave my home better than I found it.
Aidan Fitzsimons ’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) knows a secret about Standish Hall that he’ll only share with those who are worthy.