Harvard Eppsclusivity

INSTEAD OF HOLLERING about the "ball for the few," undergraduates would do well to direct their protests towards the "invitation only" functions scheduled for the College 350th Celebration. It is unfortunate, perhaps insensitive, for Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III to schedule a ball that only some of the students can attend; it is downright offensive for him to choose who will be invited to lavish teas and dinners based on some nebulous conception of merit.

Epps said that only a very small percentage of the functions are restricted to invited guests. He failed to mention, however, which functions require invitations. Sure, any lowly undergraduate can munch on hot dogs and listen to the Kroks in the yard. But if you want to get within earshot of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun '29 or James Atlas '71 you better become a campus leader very quickly.

More important, the very fact that these celebrations are exclusive makes them desirable. Everyone wants to be chosen by those who choose only few. Members of Harvard's exclusive Finals Clubs may wax eloquent about the wonders of pool tables and saunas; but, when it comes down to it, the allure of the clubs lies in the very fact that they are exclusive. Similarly, the "Harvard mystique" is less a result of Harvard's education than of the difficulty of getting in.

Of course, in certain instances, exclusivity is unavoidable. Harvard would admit a much less capable group of students, if the dean of admissions simply drew applications from a hat, and Loeb productions would be less than stellar, if actors were cast on a first-come-first-serve basis.

But it's quite another matter to promote exclusivity for exclusivity's sake. To do so is to elevate some at the expense of others, all the while pandering to society's crudest ideas of success and failure.

EPPS, ever the diplomat, denies that he is being exclusive. Invitations are being sent out, he says, to those who have displayed interest in the speaker's field of specialty. Thus, the president of the Advocate will hear Atlas and John Fernandez '69, while the chairman of the Undergraduate Council will make toasts to Secretary of Education William Bennett.

But since when has leadership been the sole guage of interest? The fact that I never have been mistaken for William Faulkner doesn't mean that I want to attend the dinner for Harvard writers any less than the editor of Padan Aram. And while it is true that most student leaders are talented, dedicated and hard-working, many could be described with less flattering adjectives. How about aggressive, competitive and single-minded?

But perhaps Epps has simply made an innocent mistake. After all, even deans can, on occasion, be out of touch with student sentiment. There is little reason to give him that much credit, however. The invitations have not yet been mailed and Epps is perfectly capable of changing his mind and holding a lottery for the tickets. Instead, he insists that there is no time to make this change. Why it takes more time to run names through a computer than it does to search through students' resumes is anyone's guess.

Of course, the irony of this controversy is that the celebration was intended as a contrast to the gala in early September; a festivity for the whole University, not just for prestigious alumni. But elitism runs too thick in Epps' veins. Instead of kowtowing to distinguished alumni, he now kowtows to distinguished students. In so doing, he once again divides the university into a large "us-and-them": the haves and the have-nots, the successful and the unsuccessful, the invited and the uninvited.