Word: lamontism
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...morning of Jan. 3, 1949, Lamont Library opened its doors for the first time. The building had taken two years and $2.5 million to construct, which apparently went to good use—on the day of Lamont’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, The Crimson bragged that the box-like red-brick structure set a “new mark in functional design...
...course of the building’s history—which includes memorable moments like the “Great Burrito Riot” of 2005, when 1,500 undergraduates stormed the library in hopes of snagging free Felipe’s promised by the Undergraduate Council—Lamont has come into its own in ways that its founders hardly could have imagined. It now serves as the epicenter of Harvard academic life, the site of countless nights spent preparing papers and problem sets...
...Lamont houses everything from an impressive sheet music collection to an assortment of antique telescopes. Its walls are adorned with colorful exhibits honoring the winners of Philip Hofer Book-Collecting Prizes and the photography competitions sponsored by the Office of International Programs. On the third floor, you can find a literary map of Cambridge, highlighting spots like Weeks Footbridge—the site of Quentin Compson’s suicide in The Sound and the Fury, (Faulkner wrote that Harvard was a place “where the best of thought clings like dead ivy vines upon old dead brick?...
More than anything else, though, the library teaches us about the students who call it home. Lamont embodies the ethos of Harvard better than any other place on its campus. It is the school’s foremost temple to its reigning ideology—the Protestant ethic expressed in the Biblical admonishment: “See thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before Kings” (Proverbs...
This sanctification of labor permeates Lamont, where Harvard students, hounded by the insatiable need to stay busy enough to deserve their privileged place in the modern meritocracy, combat fears of inadequacy through righteous striving. In the library’s confines, undergrads complain about work even when they have none, as if terrified by the prospect of idleness. For, as Max C. E. Weber wrote, in capitalist society, the waste of time is “the first and in principle the deadliest of sins...