Editorials

The following are excerpts from Crimson staff editorials printed this academic year.

FREE SPEECH is one thing, but it does not include the right to issue death threats with impunity. Nor does it include the right to take somebody else's belongings. City University of New York (CUNY) Professor Leonard Jeffries did both last October when a Crimson editor interviewed him in New York.

Academic freedom is another thing, but it should not include the right to encourage a Final Solution for whites. According to the CUNY student newspaper, Jeffries did so once in a CUNY classroom.

Of course, Jeffries has the legal right to espouse whatever ridiculous theories on race he can conjure up. But his message of division and cultural nationalism can only lead his followers--many of them inner-city Blacks still desperate for truly equal political representation--to violence. His power to incite hatred, his anti-Semitism and his anti-gay attitudes should be recognized as hateful non-scholarship.

Still, none of these things, horrifying as they are, makes Jeffries totally unacceptable as a guest speaker at Harvard. The Black Students Association (BSA), along with the Black Law students Association and the DuBois Graduate Society, asked Jeffries to speak in Sanders Theatre in February.

Our objections to this invitation stemmed not from Jeffries' beliefs. Indeed, the BSA has every right to invite whomever they want, including people with non-mainstream and even racist views of history. When Conrad Muhammad was invited, for example, The Crimson did not object. Our gripe with the Jeffries invitation was founded on the belief that no organization should honor a violent criminal with a Harvard podium. In short, Jeffries should have appeared in a court in February, not in Sanders.

LAST NOVEMBER, Harvard buzzed about Peninsula's long-awaited special issue on homosexuality. The magazine even drew national press as it sparked protests on campus at which two professors, including Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, came out of the closet.

But while the issue was hurtful and clearly offensive to many of us who disagree with its central proposition, it wasn't hateful. It was well within the bounds of intellectual discourse. They made arguments--most of them riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and irrelevancies--but arguments nonetheless.

None of their observations came close to demonstrating that homosexuality is "bad." Imagine that gays were, in fact, "not truly happy." What would that prove? Only that homosexuals were unhappy. Not that homosexuality was in any way "bad." Practicing gay sex can indeed be dangerous. So can practicing heterosexual sex. That doesn't make either "bad." Being a police officer can be dangerous, too. Peninsula thinks homosexuality is "unnatural"? Who cares? So is Astroturf. And cow manure is natural. Peninsula's writers should think carefully before the equate their version of "unnatural" with "bad."

Later in the year, the Concerned Christians at Harvard (CCH), attacked Gomes and called for his resignation as Memorial Church minister. CCH insisted that it was not asking for his resignation because he is a homosexual--only because he's not a self-hating homosexual. One CCH member said, "If Gomes were repentant of his homosexuality...there wouldn't be a need to call for his resignation." And CCH said it wanted Gomes fired on the grounds that he preached something they see as antithetical to Christianity.

Basically, all of this boils down to a theological dispute--one that should be debated at the Divinity School, not in University Hall. Of course Gomes should not be dismissed over such a dispute. For our part, we do not think homosexuality is in any way "wrong" or "hurtful." And Gomes himself has been a valuable member of the community. Still, we must object to the continued existence of institutionalized Christianity at Harvard. The policy of mixing academics with religion should end. It belies the ideal of a "secular" University and is simply unfair to non-Christians. One option is for Memorial Church to become an ecumenical religious center for all students.

WE DON'T REJECT many advertisements. Then again, we don't get offered too many blatantly false ads from blatantly anti-Semites. Last December, The Crimson and other college papers received a full-page ad explaining how the thought police was preventing academic debate about the Holocaust's non-existence, how the photos, documents and eyewitness accounts proving the obvious in fact prove nothing, how "Zionists and others in the Jewish community" whose "political and financial support for Jewish causes" had led "a conspiracy to suppress the truth." We chose not to run the ad and returned the money.

Over the years, many controversial arguments we have disagreed with have been made on these pages. But we're not talking about a controversial argument based on questionable facts in this case. We're talking about vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that has been discredited time and again.

Simply put, we do not print just anything, and we will not prostitute this paper to "disseminate the good news" of lies and hatred. There will be borderline cases for this rule, but this was not one of them.

SEVERAL MONTHS after the Date Rape Task Force released is long-awaited report, in April the Undergraduate Council also debated the ways in which the College should deal with cases of acquaintance rape. The Council approved a definition of rape as any sexual act that occurs "despite the expressed unwillingness of the victim" and left in a "gray area" those cases in which the initiator "falls to elicit consent, resulting in psychological or physical harm of the victim."

In addition, the council recommended that disciplinary action for perpetrators of "sexual negligence" be less severe than for perpetrators of rape--when the unwillingness of the victim was expressed.

But how is it less a crime to force sex on someone who does express unwillingness? Why should victims too traumatized to shout or fight be treated differently from those able to do so?

Of course, in some cases those who bring charges of date rape are intentionally or unintentionally distorting what can be murky facts. But the answer should not be to adopt a standard unfair to those victims who have been raped but who could not express their anger, fear or unwillingness. Thus the date Rape Task Force was right to adopt a definition of rape as any sexual act "that occurs without the expressed consent of the person..." This makes it incumbent on initiators of sex to obtain a specific "yes" or "no."

IN THEIR ANNUAL Revue spoof edition this year, some Harvard Law review editors included an article titled "He-Manifesto of Post-Mortem Legal Feminism (From the Desk of Mary Doe)," a parody of an article published in the Law Review in March by the late feminist legal scholar Mary Joe Frug.

The sick parody was not only an insult to Frug's family but to feminists, women and thinking people everywhere. The parody was condemned by many members of the Harvard community, but the frightening insensitivity of the parody authors and the lack of immediate response from Dean Robert C. Clark may be indicative of larger problems at the Law School.

HARVARD is not shy about extolling the virtues of a diverse community. But while the University is relatively free of outright bigotry, there should be more of an institutional commitment both to react to crises and to work actively to remedy the problems of living in a community of difference. As one student said, "putting people together without getting their mentalities ready to be put together" is not effective in achieving racial harmony. There is a commitment to diversity in numbers, but not diversification of outlook and attitudes.

Minority and majority students alike thus often engage in celebration of their own cultures without ever being asked to understand others.' Race-and ethnicity-rooted incidents of harassment may not be the rule at Harvard, but they do occur. Clearly, the University could do more.

But neither Assistant Dean Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle's Office of race Relations and Minority Affairs nor S. Allen Counter's Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations has a clearly defined role in the University. Worse, this confusion has led to counterproductive and childish hostility between the two administrators. Of the two offices, the Foundation is more visible on campus and hosts well-attended "feel good" activities which celebrate cultures on campus. But simply celebrating cultures does little to foster acceptance of those cultures by other students.

Furthermore, the Foundation's director, Allen Counter, has largely compromised any role he could play as a builder of racial and ethnic harmony by alienating some students on campus, particularly Jews.

Counter co-authored a letter to The crimson in April which included, among a litany of misrepresentations, racially charged language about a "Crimson group" whose "writers active in Hillel" support a "racial agenda" that includes overlooking and perhaps agreeing with anti-Black sentiments.

Counter expressed similar attitudes about Jewish media control in a 1985 article in The Crisis magazine and once referred to a Crimson reporter he had not met as a "that militant Jew." Clearly, Allen Counter is not the one to spearhead Harvard's effort to achieve true racial and ethnic understanding.

The administrator with a broader mandate to reach out to students is Hernandez-Gravelle. But relatively few students know about her office, which, among other tasks, handles harassment cases. Few undergraduates attend the events sponsored by Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism, the student group that works out of her office. What good is an outreach program if it doesn't reach anyone?

The administrator devoted to improving our understanding (and, implicitly, increasing our acceptance) of one another and our various cultures must raise interest, galvanize students, attract crowds. Hernandez-Gravelle's relative anonymity renders her all but ineffective.

Some might say that this sort of understanding and acceptance of difference is personal and that the University can do little as an institution to help. But more discussion and fewer speeches, perhaps a required meeting for first-year students and almost certainly a new, charismatic administrator in charge of diversity would be good places to start. Coordinating all the activities out of one office is also a must.

AT ISSUE for many in the ROTC debate is not whether the military should end its policy of excluding gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Many ROTC defenders agree that it should.

The debate at Harvard has centered around financial concerns. One report last fall found that 89 percent of ROTC students on campus said they would not have come to Harvard if the University did not accept ROTC funds. But if money is a major concern (as it was for more than eight in 10 of this 89 percent), Harvard offers need-based aid to every student who qualifies.

We recognize that Harvard's definition of "qualification" for financial aid may mean hardships for middle and working class families. But in that case, the issue should be how we can make Harvard affordable for all qualified students. This should not require accepting discriminatory funding from ROTC.

A campus-wide fracas has erupted over no other case of such clear discrimination. No amount of caterwauling about the faults of financial aid would force Harvard to accept money from Nazis or the KKK. Obviously ROTC is not devoted to the oppression of homosexuals, but the military's discrimination is no less clearly stated. For now, the choice for the Faculty Council is clear: ROTC funding should go.