When a pro-Palestine encampment went up in Harvard Yard last month, the dean of students sent out an e-mail warning the campers that they faced punishment. The encampment, he wrote, was disrupting the residents of freshman dorms as they studied for finals. The Harvard Crimson found otherwise. “Freshmen Say Noise From Harvard Yard Encampment Not Disruptive,” a headline read. The paper did, however, find a different source of disturbance: “ ‘Like a Horror Movie’: Freshmen Complain About Mice in Dorms.”
“They sound like this,” Diane Sun, a prospective social-studies major from Seattle, said the other day, tapping her nails on the arm of a chair to mimic the mice that she hears skittering across her floor at night. She was sitting in the Yard, wearing a camel-colored coat and gray New Balances. Her first year on campus had already included billboard trucks plastered with students’ faces, billionaire-backed offensives against the university’s president, and, now, the fracas over the encampment. Of the protesters, Sun said, “They’re just out and about studying, painting, doing things like that. I’ve never heard anybody complain.” She added, “I’ve definitely heard a lot of people complain about mice.”
Somehow, Sun had made it through the fall without seeing a single mouse in her dorm, Hollis Hall, a fortresslike building that once housed George Washington’s troops. But this spring, after months of teasing friends in “mouse nests” like Straus and Canaday, Sun, returning to Hollis after class, saw a floor mate crouched outside the building in distress. “Did you forget your I.D.?” Sun asked. Then she smelled the peppermint oil—well known in Hollis as a D.I.Y. repellent. The mice had come for them at last.
Rodents are a fixture around Harvard, like the news crews during the run-up to President Claudine Gay’s resignation. The Crimson, 1939: “MICE INUNDATION TROUBLES GRADUATE TEACHING SCHOOL.” February 11, 1980: “Winthrop Students Decry Mouse Population Boom.” March 7, 1989: “RATS IN YOUR DINING HALL.” (“I don’t know what poison the exterminator feeds them, but they just keep getting bigger.”) In “Mahalia Mouse Goes to College,” a picture book by the Harvard alum John Lithgow, a precocious rodent foraging around Dunster House ends up in a student’s backpack and gets transported to a physics lecture. (Four years later—after “recitals and plays, Glee club and squash, a brief square-dancing phase”—she earns a bachelor-of-science degree.) “It’s almost a Harvard tradition,” Sun said.
She headed up to her dorm room—an impressively messy second-floor double with dark wainscoting, a nonworking fireplace, and plenty of hiding spots for stealthy vermin—to give a tour of the murine front lines. She pointed out snap traps in her closet, under her roommate’s dresser, and by their mini-fridge.
Sun isn’t especially squeamish. In high school, she recited an original poem about scaling a carp (“its gills should be stark red—the intrusion of fate into viscera”) for Jill Biden, at the White House. But the extermination efforts have got to her. She recently found a dead mouse in one of the traps. “I couldn’t take a nap that day,” she said. “I felt it looking at me.” A classmate had to kill a maimed mouse using a bottle of mouthwash as a cudgel. Sun and a friend once spent an hour using Lysol wipes to clean blood and fur off the floor.
Sun has seen a live mouse only once, when she and her roommate were awakened at night by squeaking. “I turned on my flashlight and we saw it run,” she said. “It had been eating something—probably the snacks in my roommate’s backpack, which the mouse later shat in.” They called Harvard Yard Operations and busied themselves with preventive measures. They plugged up holes in the heating grate and threw out their supply of instant noodles.
Some upperclassmen are inured to the vermin. Maia Patel Masini, a junior in Kirkland House, has seen a mouse in the cafeteria trying to drink from the nozzle of a milk dispenser. “They’re honestly really cute from afar,” she said. Harvard Yard Operations keeps a Mice F.A.Q.s guide online, but Sun and her friends don’t consider it particularly helpful: “It’s literally, like, ‘Some people find mice to be a very rewarding part of Harvard!’ ” The Philosophical Musings section links to a YouTube video of the linguist Steven Pinker reading from the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
To test whether the mice were still in residence, Sun’s roommate recently set out a cracker before bed; she was relieved to find it intact the next morning. But within a few days—shortly before the administration and the protesters negotiated an end to the encampment—the roommates found a tattered Mr. Goodbar wrapper behind a floor lamp. A mouse had left it. Sun explained, “We don’t eat that kind of chocolate.” ♦