Professorial Privacy

To The Editors of The Crimson:

I wish to comment on Professor Jorge Dominguez's petulant but understandable protest against being telephoned at home by students and colleagues. His complaint is fair. If he has indeed made it clear that his privacy should be respected in this way, then violations of that injunction are rude. Perhaps he is justified even in his suggestion that this understanding should be implicit within the academic community or in any other professional or work setting. Of course he must know that the individual policies of faculty and graduate students vary so widely here that it must be difficult for students to perceive any general rule.

Inexcusable, however, is his superfluous observation that an inordinately high percentage of these intrusive callers have been women. He mourns for the atrophy of some peculiarly female instinct for the sanctity--the inviolability--of the nest concluding of course that the attenuation of such feminine gentility can be attributed to "the wide-spread professionalization of women at Harvard."

Bah! How can one deploy rational argument against such dreck? Professor Dominguez's own confession to an "antiquarian and deeply sexist" bias is the same horribly coy refusal to tackle his own destructive prejudices that I have seen again and again among men his age. It has probably constituted the Harvard faculty's most powerful--because unanswerable--defense against what it perceives as the invasion of hordes of Amazonian scholars, armed with Ph.D.'s (and Lord knows who gave them those), shrill voices, and--worst of all--the gall (shall we say) to call a mild-mannered male professor in his own home during family time.

(My students may continue to call me at home, since having abdicated my biological responsibility to aid in the survival of the race, I keep cats instead cats instead of kids.) Mina J. Carson   Teaching Fellow   Department of History