Due to renovation of the Hasty Pudding building, parts of Apley Court and Claverly Hall will go vacant next year. According to College Housing Officer Sue Watts, students from Adams and Lowell House living in Claverly will be redistributed to DeWolfe, and other Lowell students will be moved to the part of Apley Court that does not face the construction.

Watts says she does not have additional information on the impact that the Cowperthwaite construction will have on undergraduate housing.

SCRAMBLE FOR SPACE

University officials have emphasized that more graduate student housing is necessary in order to stay competitive with peer institutions.

A survey of graduate students conducted by the University in 2001 revealed that only 38 percent of graduate students live in Harvard-owned housing, although 75 percent would like to do so.

The Cowperthwaite project represents just one part of the University’s thrust to house 50 percent of its graduate students by 2011.

Incoming graduate students are not guaranteed housing and many arrive without a clear sense of where they will be living. Renting off-campus apartments can require having a significant amount of cash up front, which some graduate students say they do not have on reserve.

“I have a daughter—I’m a single parent—and I didn’t have thousands of dollars up front, so I was really counting on a Harvard apartment,” says Cropper, who ended up getting space in Harvard housing.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean Peter T. Ellison wrote in an e-mail that schools such as MIT, Princeton, and Stanford are all taking steps to reduce the housing crunch for graduate students.

“Like our peers, we do not want to see the population of GSAS graduate students driven by housing costs and availability farther and farther from the campus,” wrote Ellison, who serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee on the University’s “Fair Market Rent” policy.

Undergraduate organizers originally questioned the decision to house graduate students on Cowperthwaite Street, saying it would further isolate Dunster and Mather Houses from the rest of the undergraduate community.

The building is zoned specifically for graduate students after lobbying by neighbors, who feared late-night noise and were upset by the conversion of DeWolfe into undergraduate housing after the University promised it would be for graduate students and junior faculty.

According to Ellison, the design of the new building leaves open the possibility of converting it to undergraduate use in the future.

“If the Quad was converted to graduate student housing, the [Cowperthwaite Street] building could be readily converted to ‘suites’ and added to Leverett or one of the other nearby houses for undergraduate occupancy,” Ellison wrote.

For now, though, Dunster House resident Iliana Montauk ’06 says students recognize that graduate students will be living in the building, and are focusing on concerns that they believe the building’s future inhabitants might share.