Fix Features

Zzzzzz: Harvard May Install a Student ‘Nap Room’

by Nathan Harden - Fix Editor on March 4, 2013

You know how in preschool, all the little kids lay down for “nap time” every afternoon? Well, Harvard students may soon be getting the preschool treatment. USA Today reports:

Often without time to walk home between classes, a centralized nap room location — or nap pods in various campus areas — would create convenient space for this sleep-deprived demographic to catch up on their zzz’s, said Harvard sophomore Sietse Goffard, Undergraduate Council Student Life Committee member.“Knowing how busy and overwhelmed a lot of Harvard students are, a nap space is really helpful,” Goffard said. “I know more sleeping would greatly enhance my learning experience.”

Accessible with a Harvard ID, students will be able to pick up a blanket and pillow upon signing in with the room moderator. There they’ll write their nap duration and leave belongings in a locker, according to the nap-space proposal Hou created with Harvard’s Happiness Project.

I’m totally supportive if someone wants to take a short siesta back in one’s dorm room. But the idea of “overwhelmed” Harvard students laying down in little curtained cubbyholes with pillows and blankies under supervision from a “room monitor” feels a little too infantile to me.

Maybe they should go all the way and issue each student a teddy bear when they sign in!

Am I the only person who’s turned off by the idea of full-grown adults taking naps in public areas?

And aren’t we pampering college students just a little too much here?

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Tagged as: College, Harvard, health, infantile, library, nap rooms, nap time, siesta, sleep deprivation, wellness

  • Donald_Dump

    Not nearly as infantile as whining about adults having consensual sex.

  • Jim A.

    Actually I think it is a pretty good idea. Often students have a 20 minute walk from a classroom building back to their dorms. If a class ends at, say 11:20, and they have had classes since 8:30 (yes, it still happens, at least in the sciences), and maybe a lab starting at 12:30, it might be more efficient to allow them a bit of sleep time without a 40 minute slug back and forth to the dorm. They already carry every single book they could possibly ever need with them to avoid that walk. It sounds like, at least this time, Harvard has come up with something reasonable.

  • davesnothere

    When I was in college (besides walking 10 miles everyday, uphill, both ways, in a driving snowstorm to every class) the places where we used to take mid-day naps were called “lecture halls.” The idea was to prepare you for real life, where you would be forced to nap in something called a “conference room.”

    Seriously, are there “nap rooms” in most workplaces these days? No? Then maybe Harvard students should try adopting a coping mechanism that actual non-student working stiffs often employ: SLEEP AT NIGHT. This quaint, traditional practice is often highly convenient, since so few appointments (or classes) are scheduled during the overnight hours. However, given the current state of universal oppression, it is unreasonable to expect a mere student with no real world experience to figure this out on his own unless he has already taken “Critical Nap Theory”, which is only open to upperclasspersons.

    Otherwise, I see it as a great opportunity for Karl Farbman to sell some furniture.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=722960755 Julia Holcomb

    It’s lying down, not laying down. But then, I guess you didn’t go to Harvard.