The undergrads call it the Room of Requirement. Down the bottom of a stairwell in one of the entrances coming off Old Campus quad- no, I shan’t tell you which one nor how to recognize it, for that would ruin the mystique -around the corner and going past where the hallway doubles back on itself to support the hodgepodge of additions and support beams to the colonial architecture, you may find a room with no clearly defined use.
The air is still and without pretension. The room is an in-between size; too large to be used as an office, at least for anyone whose office could be relegated to a basement, yet not large enough to use as a classroom or similar function space. One could imagine it being cleaned up and designated with some vague title of “lounge”, and indeed, the mismatched chairs and tables- some folding, some fixed -scattered ‘round suggest this may have once been the intention. But the lack of uniformity in furnishings and arrangement makes it clear that if there ever was a plan for this space, that notion has long since been dismissed.
It might be called storage, though it is hard to imagine for what purpose its contents are being stored. Still, a wide variety of finely aged bric-a-brac, tchotchkes, and assorted paraphernalia migrates here. The perimeter is ringed with lazily stacked boxes, which are every now and again labeled with an event, or some project, or perhaps even a date. I have not investigated to ascertain whether these boxes actually contain what they purport to contain, but allegedly there are some copies of flagship undergraduate literary journals which have sat here undisturbed from the year I was born.
There is a sense of timelessness here, as though one is unmoored from the usual progression of things. Sitting for what seems like an hour, one realizes only a few minutes have passed; conversely, stay only a couple moments and one might be hours late to an appointment. The room itself, it will be observed, is a space out of time. While there are enough artifacts that one could hazard a reasonably accurate guess at the year, the room and its contents could also quite easily appear in a scene dated any time in the last century or so.
The legend passed down from successive generations of undergrads is that the room will provide whatever one requires: hence the moniker. Need a new binder or some loose leaf paper? The room will provide. Struggling to keep your dorm at a comfortable temperature? Perchance, a portable fan is waiting for you. Studying for the MCAT? It would appear someone left some flash cards for future students. The room is undoubtedly a splendid place to sit and escape the hustle-bustle of campus life for a few moments, and however many people are with always seems to be the number of seats to be found. The room will not solve all your problems, but it may equip you with weapons with which to face them.
As a graduate student and a scientist, I am naturally skeptical of anything claimed by undergrads to exert magical powers. Still, the tale of the Room of Requirement fascinates me on several levels.
It does not escape my attention that having a room of unmanaged bric a brac for open pilfering such as it may prove useful would be considered at my undergraduate Alma mater an unforgivable example of institutional waste. In one sense this is undeniably true: no value is extracted from the room by the university, who pays for the upkeep, and I would wager at one point paid for a substantial portion of the various items that compose the mass. Absent any kind of stewardship, the room reduces more or less openly to ritualized looting.
Yet I think the university is better for the room’s existence, or at the very least, that such a room could come into being is a sign of a healthy university.
For one, it shows that the necessary trappings of university life- paper, pencils, textbooks, flashcards, dorm furniture, and so on -are not so scarce or hard to come by that they immediately vanish. Rather they exist in sufficient abundance that the less fortunate may survive by skimming off the excess. These wild grasses show the soil is rich and healthy for cultivation. It is a keystone species, showing a healthy ecosystem.
For another, I admire the sense of whimsy and community that the Room of Requirement bespeaks. At my undergrad, the Room would quickly become the subject of one or another committee meetings. People with Important Official Titles would be appointed to deconstruct and allocate its contents. Reports with tables and graphs would be circulated. The Room would be systematically vivisected by the bureaucracy before anyone had the opportunity to receive its benefits. Yet here it is.
Given the reverence with which the undergrads speak of the Room of Requirement, one gets the sense that if it did not exist, given all the intangible factors supporting one’s existence, one would come into being soon enough.
