Their Love of Equality

I WOULD FIRST LIKE to say how much I love your city. I have been to Leverett House, I have eaten at your Tommy's Lunch. This is truly God's country, it is only too bad you are not God's people.

When I first came to Cambridge my friend Ramon told me, "The bricks are very pretty, the ivy is very green, but the people, well Alexis, they are very strange." Only the next day I said to my friend Ramon, "Ramon, you are right, the students of Cambridge are certainly strange, and perhaps more than that." The night before I had gone to one of their local parties where a girl told me I should not wear my good suit but dungarees and a workingman's shirt. "God made me ugly enough," I told her. "If He had wanted me to look like a cow I would have been born in Texas." The students of Adams House are very smelly. At one of their parties you do not have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

The greatest passion of the Cambridge students is their love of equality. The cause of equality has been advocated by many great men in many eras, most of which were before I was born. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that Society was not equal to the sum of its parts. Henry Ford made parts interchangeable. Voltaire said that "we must cultivate our own garden." Thomas Jefferson owned a large plantation. John Locke told us that when we are born our minds are like a tabula rasa, or a "blank slate." John Dewey thought we should keep it that way. History has taught us many lessons, few of which anyone remembers.

In the American Democracy there are a number of poor citizens who are known as the underprivileged. The privilege they do not have is money. Since some people are underprivileged it is understood that others are overprivileged. The children of the families in this second group all go to Harvard, or else to Radcliffe, its sister college. Of course, in the United States of America there is no explicit "privilege," but the children of those who are affluent and educated have an enormous range of opportunities early in life that guarantees their later success. They live in a literate environment, with books all around. The average overprivileged child of three or four will pull a volume down from the shelf of the family library and read as fast as he can slit open the pages. In the evening his parents will sip martinis or discuss the editorials of The New York Times, either way providing a stimulating environment for their schoolchild. By listening in on the parental conversations -- "Bill and Mary are getting divorced" or "the market slumped twenty points in late afternoon profit-taking" -- he is unconsciously being prepared for his verbal aptitude tests. The exceptionally overprivileged child has an opportunity to mingle with adults, passing hors d'ouevres on the evenings when his parents stay home, at which time they might pat him on the head or say hello.

THESE OVERPRIVILEGED Americans have had tremendous advantages. By the time they arrive in Cambridge they have been class presidents and National Merit finalists, and secretly wonder whether or not Jesus of Nazareth is their half brother. But they prefer to look like Indians and smell like buffalo.

It is not all so bad as that with the people of Harvard. Some are light-hearted and charming. In the spring they throw the frisbee! To each other, back and forth. They want to have the good times. Today is the first day of the rest of their life! Yet they can also be a serious people. I have seen them at work in the laboratories of the twentieth chemistry course.

On one of the spring evenings I was walking across the footbridge across the Charles, the sun was setting with a few last rays lighting the green-covered walls and white spires of Cambridge. The cars rushed along on the highway with their headlights going and on the river a few last boats of crew raced. Monet and Raphael are right, I think, the world is beautiful.

The equality movement offers many real advantages. Everybody will have a great deal in common, so that it will be easier to make conversation. But, at the same time, there is not room enough for everyone on the bottom rungs of society.

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, the poor are the salt of the earth. The students of Cambridge think it is virtuous to imitate them, so they wear dungarees and dirty hair and tell "dudes" not to "jive" them. Actually there are many rich people who are quite salty. The behavior of the students might seem phony, but that is not what is so important. The truth is that virtue cannot be impersonated, and exists in people's hearts and minds rather than in their wallets and affectations. But this problem of equality is hard to solve. Perhaps the students of Cambridge are right that everyone should come together and join hands, but I think they should wash them first.

Some people might want to criticise what I say, but I hope they notice my funny accent and keep in mind that I am a third-world person.