An Unhappy Birthday

NEXT WEEK, on the 350th anniversary of Harvard's founding, the College is throwing a special party for undergraduates. The odds are that you're not invited.

While the four-day, University-wide celebration earlier this month may have been among the best of times for thousands of Harvard alumni, the undergraduate festivities promise to be an embarrassment and an insult to every student. What should be a celebration of the College at its best pays homage to Harvard's worst traditions of elitism and exclusivity.

In planning the celebration, the dean of students, Archie C. Epps III, and his small, select group of student assistants demonstrated a callous disregard for the community at large.

They made only superficial efforts to solicit the views of any wider segment of the student population. They made no effort to seek the advice of the Undergraduate Council, the only arguably representative body in the College. Nevertheless, Undergraduate Council Chairman Brian C. Offutt '87 and other council members were aware of the 350th planners' intentions almost every step of the way, and they betrayed the people who elected them by failing to raise objections.

The result reflects the narrow mindedness of the planners and the process they employed. Woefully out of touch with the student mainstream, Epps and his aides catered their affair to suit a Final Club social set and a favored few undergraduates.

Four of the featured events--two luncheons, a tea, and a dinner, all with distinguished guests of honor--are by invitation only. For example, a luncheon to honor writing at Harvard, an event that might interest a wide audience of students, has been closed to all but 60. The coordinators in University Hall have already drafted the guest lists. The bulk of the invitations will soon land in the mailboxes of students who hold positions of perceived power or prestige in campus organizations. In demographic terms, your 17 percent chance of gaining admission to Harvard was more than double the likelihood of your copping an invitation to one of the exclusive gatherings.

If Epps and his helpers understood that false selectivity offends the average undergraduate, they could have saved themselves long hours laboring over guest lists. Special events should have been designed with broad participation in mind, and admission should have been extended to all interested students. Where limited admission was unavoidable, lotteries could have resolved problems efficiently and equitably.

One highlight of the celebration is the "Grand Ball," a lavish black tie affair on October 11. It will no doubt prove a memorable evening for those fortunate enough to attend. But even appropriately attired students willing to pay $15 per ticket will be left to their own devices that night, because entrance to the ball has been limited to 4500.

Dean Epps observes that passes to The Grand Ball are "the hottest tickets in town." The dean says the demand caught him by surprise: he didn't expect that many undergraduates to be interested in a formal soiree.

That astonishing statement leaves us scratching our heads and wondering why Epps planned the event in the first place--and for whom it was really intended.

The astonishment doesn't stop there, however.

Beyond a few exceptions, Epps says, the undergraduate 350th offers something for everyone. And of course, the dean is right. If you can't dance beneath an ice sculpture of John Harvard or dine with the master of John Harvard's alma mater, you can always attend the Harvard-Cornell football game, or listen to a "New England Bandstand Concert" featuring various undergraduate performing groups.

Even the events that are generally accessible, however, offer a sad commentary on the state of Harvard College in 1986.

Much of the hoopla revolves around the presence of "distinguished guests" at the houses. These honored guests include Powell Professor of American Literature Alan Heimert '49, the master of Eliot House, Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky '59, a member of the Harvard Corporation, and John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus.

The "presence of distinguished alumni and affiliates in the houses," so pompously promoted for the 350th, is supposed to be an everyday occurrence. The fact that it takes a very special occasion indeed to bring Henry Rosovsky to Mather House offers an honest but ironic commentary on the distance between undergraduates and Harvard's elder elite.

And in the houses, the story is one of disparities. While Lowell House residents gaze at a video portrait of the campus, their Eliot peers will host Leonard Bernstein '39, someone whose presence in a house dining hall is truly something special.

All things considered, the seven-day program of events reveals nothing so much as an absence of rationale. The jubilee lacks intellectual emphasis, and even more conspicuously, it loses sight of the occasion, giving us little opportunity to reflect on Harvard's past, present, and future.

A few weeks ago, before the general student population returned to Cambridge, Harvard's alumni and elder elite celebrated the 350th at special party of their own. The powers that be left all but a few token undergraduates out of that celebration; now, they are leaving us out of the celebration that is ostensibly our own.

Dissenting Opinion

THE UNDERGRADUATE 350th celebration of Harvard has, unfortunately, left many undergraduates insulted rather than inspired. The majority, frightened by the prospect of Dean Epps choosing his favored undergraduates to attend exclusive events, has condemned the proposed commemoration as an affirmation of Harvard's worst traditions.

This understandable concern has led the majority to attack not only elitism, but also the very idea of having events which only a select number of undergraduates may attend. Planned fairly, though, invitation-only events are an entirely appropriate way for the whole university to celebrate itself.

Harvard at its best is a community based not so much on democracy as meritocracy. What is great about this university, and what sadly is untrue about this country, is that equality of opportunity does exist here. It is up to us as individual members of this community to take advantage of our opportunity. Inviting the acknowledged leaders of the undergraduate population to these selective events celebrates not so much the individual achievements of the guests, but a community which provides us the unique opportunity to pursue the best in each of us.

Elitists often argue that they are entitled to favors by right of birth. It seems quite the same for Harvard students to argue that because they are students here they have a right to attend every event.

For freshman and sophomores who inevitably will be left out, it is not so much their fault as an accident of history--it is this year and not the next which is the 350th year of Harvard. Attending a four-year institution necessarily means that some at the school--the upperclassmen--will be more a part of that school than those new to it. The school maintains it's continuity precisely through the process in which one gradually from year to year becomes more and more a part of the school. We are not nameless faceless numbers here; equal simply because we are all Harvard students. We are individuals, some who have done much here, others who have just arrived. To be truly part of this community--or any community for that matter--is to understand and to appreciate that process.

It will be a shame if Dean Epps chooses undergraduates on the basis of their lineage rather than their merit, but it is equally sad to see undergraduates craving fairness that would denigrate their individuality.