Breaking Tradition

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I am writing in reference to your coverage of the Boylston Oratory Competition (April 20, page 1) You can a picture of Jeffrey Rossman, and an announcement that he "beat our six competitors" to win first prize. However, there were two prizes awarded in the competition on Friday night. Pamela Thomas '85 presented a passage from James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," for which she received the distinction of second place. The judges took 40 minutes to reach their decision, and announced that each of the contestants had an advocate in the deliberations. Nicole Galland, who presented LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk from Omelas"; Joseph Krailik, who chose Eliot's "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon"; Randloph McGrorty, who delivered Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; Philip Resnik, who recited Rilke's "Duino Elegies"; and Jeffrey Rosen, who enacted Cicero's "The Verine Orations," all deserve recognition of their oratory skills for becoming finalists in this competition. But I feel Paniela herself, as an official prizewinne, deserves special public acknowledgement of her achievement.

The Boylston Oratory Competition might seem a place where the former all-male, all-white Harvard tradition would continue to dominate both the selection of material and the competitors. However, Harvard is different now than when the prize was bequested--women and minorities are among the population, and many more varieties of literature are read and taught. Pamela's passage underlined this change: the Baldwin selection was an account of the death of a young Black boy run over by a car full of drunken white men, and how this death affected the boy's family, and the next generation, and their feelings about white men. The judges' recognition of more than traditional material and contestants (I include the selection from Ursula LeGuin and the unusual performance of Eliot) deserves The Crimson's attention, beyond the single picture. I think an accompanying article, including an announcement of both the first and second prizewinners and list of finalists, would have been more appropriate coverage for a story of note to the student body as a whole. Deborah Catherine Cohen '86