The Other Side of Paradise

OH WHAT A PARADISE it seems. By administrative fiat, University Hall has banished all racial differences from the Harvard campus. No longer, in the administration's eyes, are there separate minority groups with separate minority problems. Instead, we are all generic Harvard students with generic Harvard student problems.

The administration has moved increasingly towards this homogenization ethic in the past two years. Most recently, in scheduling this year's Freshman Week activities, it has killed those long directed at minority students to help acclimate them to Harvard's palpably white environment.

In place of panels honestly addressing special problems of discrimination, insensitivity, and low expectations, which many minorities face at Harvard, the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) offered and featured one lifeless generic panel for all students. Vaguely entitled "Coping With Undergraduate Life," the panel did not address minority concerns explicitly, but featured two Black men, a white woman, and a white man, exuding happy diversity.

This Freshman Week idealism even filters down, inexplicably enough, to purely cultural events. The Foundation, an administrative entity independent of the FDO, was reportedly barred from using the term "Third World" in its "Evening of Third World Culture" held during Freshman Week. Instead, to obliterate any possible separatist overtones, the event was cheerfully retailed "An Evening of Song and Dance."

The administration now bandies about the term "separatist" with the abandon of a high school sophomore flaunting a new vocabulary word. Two years ago, it killed the hope of a Third World Center with the same "separatism" charge. When the University's Games Report rejected a Third World Center in 1980, in favor of the more amorphously structured Foundation, it specifically expressed a fear that a center would lead to separatism and territoriality.

Such eager renunciation of any "separatism" at Harvard is a bit disingenuous in a social environment marked by final clubs, Hillel, the Catholic Students Center, and other institutions that reinforce a group identity. In the end, it is merely a matter of economics. Final clubs need not rely on the University for funds, so they can be as separatist as they wish, Jewish and Catholic alumni underwrite their respective centers. Minorities have not been on campus long enough in great enough numbers to establish an affluent alumni network, though, so their undergraduate experiences are tied to College policy.

Ironically, the University is not even consistent in rejecting "separatist" activities for minorities. The minority pre-freshman spring weekend is about as "separatist" as any event at Harvard, but the University continues to foot the bill. The reason is simple. Minority students do have special reservations about coming to Harvard; if the weekend were eliminated, many fewer minorities would matriculate. As long as it is trying to attract minorities, Harvard must address their special needs. Once minority students are here, though, the urgency is gone.

UNQUESTIONABLY, there is a kernel of truth to the University's fears. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, over 100 Blacks all live together in one Black house, arguably hindering interracial contact. But a few Freshman Week activities, or a little special attention to the unique obstacles that affect minorities here, would hardly mean militant separatism.

The administration, then, essentially means well. If it were possible to say categorically that minorities are not under special stress in this environment because they are minorities, it would be preferable not to call attention needlessly to the matter of race. But eliminating such attention would not eradicate the stress.

Harvard still has only 12 Blacks, and equally sparse numbers of other minorities, on a Faculty exceeding 700. For all of the University's talk of eliminating racial differences among undergraduates, there are few institutions as racially "separatist" around Harvard as its own Faculty Club. As long as minority students must face a near-uniformly white Faculty, it is unrealistic to pretend that there is nothing different about being a minority student here.

The administration losses over further subtleties of student life in maintaining that we are all just generic Harvard students. Year after year, there is uncorroborated grumbling by minority athletes that minorities just aren't fielded equally on some squads. Countless students report slight and not-so-slight insensitivity toward minority students by section leaders. Incidents like these, if and when they happen, happen to individual students not because they are Harvard students but because of their affiliation with a group.

And even if Harvard could somehow control everything that occurs on campus, and turn the College into an integrated paradise, there is little the University can do to enlighten some parts of Boston. When minority recruiters go out to inner city high schools and urge promising students to apply to Harvard, racial tensions in the city of Boston are high on the list of potential applicants' worries. Just this summer, in a well-publicized incident, a Black couple and their two small children were attacked while their car was stopped at a red light by young whites shouting racial epithets. Until Harvard can turn Boston into an ideal of racial cooperation, minority students will still have to deal with special concerns.

There is an air of the 1950s about the direction in which Harvard's attitudes are evolving, as demonstrated in recent policy shifts on minorities and women. The goal is apparently to assume that everyone is basically white, male, Protestant, and so forth, and to trust problems of Harvard students on a case by case basis. But whether Harvard chooses to admit it or not, until society is perfect, people will continue to face problems because of their group affiliations. Wishing doesn't make it so.