Make Some Waves

I am sure that I was not the only one to note that The Harvard Crimson missed yet another opportunity to practice some substantive journalism in the recent series featuring the thirteen houses of Harvard College. Judging from the fact that each college was treated with such circumspection and discretion, one might have guessed that they were written by a joint committee representing the admissions office and various masters' offices. A tired litany of "diversity" and "uniqueness" soon put any casual reader to sleep.

For any tenacious reader who read every word, the superficiality of the analyses failed to debunk any of the widely held negative images of certain houses. The writers of The Crimson seem to suffer from a misconception that it would be a mistake to say anything which might make waves. Those of us who pay to read this newspaper, however, read it in the vain hope that it will tell us something we would not learn from the other more self-interested branches of the Harvard Corporation.

Somehow your journalists forgot the basic fact that they are free to write what they want. Journalists should want to write about real conditions, not some hunky-dory model of how things ought to be. Ironically, each of the articles appeared at the bottom of a front page jam-packed with outbursts of resentment and division on the parts of both students and faculty. One wonders how this series managed to become so detached from the kind of analysis so urgently needed. Emanuel Pastreich   Graduate School of Arts   and Sciences