Sanjana S. Ramrajvel â22 and her blockmates, who usually live in Dunster House, were dispersed geographically this past academic year. Though long distance placed a strain on their relationships, she said their ties to their Harvard House united them.
âWe all try to make it a point to go to the Dunster trivia nights,â she said. âWe would just all Zoom in from wherever we were, and that was a fun way for us to bond, but I definitely would say that we contacted each other a lot less because we werenât physically in the same location.â
Ramrajvel is one of the many students at the College who opted to live off campus this past academic year, either barred from campus as a result of the public health crisis or opting to avoid the strict residential guidelines for those in the dorms.
Ariel G. Silverman â23, a Social Studies concentrator, lives in Mather House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.
Last week, a hamburger hysteria swept through the right-wing media and Republican politicians in response to false accusations that President Joe Biden was attempting to limit Americansâ meat consumption to meet his climate change targets.
This claim originated in a misleading article in a British tabloid that connected Bidenâs climate change proposal to a 2020 academic paper discussing the implications of Americansâ dietary habits on national greenhouse gas emissions. Although the article was in no way related to Biden, Fox News host Jesse B. Watters reported that âAmericans are going to have to cut their red meat consumption by 90 percent in order to reduce emissions to hit Biden s target.â U.S. House Representative Lauren O. Boebert (R-Colo.) warned Biden to âstay out of my kitchen.â
When Christina M. Tedesco received word about the pay cut last fall, her first reaction was, “Oh my God, I have to call my coworker Mark.”
Many of her colleagues at the Harvard Art Museums, where Tedesco works as an attendant, do not have computers or cannot access their work emails from home. She had to call them to break the news: Harvard had decided to cut their wages already the lowest of any union at the University by 30 percent, and she wasn’t sure for how long museum employees would continue to be paid at all.
Soon afterward, panic set in. “It’s very unsettling to not know if you really have a job or not, if the museum is going to lay you off in a few months,” Tedesco says. “It creates a constant environment of anxiety.”