Word: needfulness
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...having dinner with some students [who said], ‘Dean, we need a no-work zone...we don’t have enough of them,’” she says. “After listening to this for a year and a half, I’m convinced that it’s an important thing for student life...
...That’s unacceptable in a day of transparency, openness, and a need for confidence in the institution,” he says...
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...
This idiosyncratic functionality was pithily put into words by Harvard librarian Heather E. Cole, who, when asked about the library’s peculiar role as a social center, responded, “I think people make of Lamont what they need...
...library and the community it sustains emerge in response to the central anxiety of Harvard life: the failure to measure up. Under Lamont’s 24-hour fluorescent lighting, no one need bear this ponderous burden alone...