Graduation Scheduling Favors Privileged

I am writing to express my outrage at Harvard University over the scheduling of graduation activities and ceremonies on a Wednesday and Thursday. It appears that Harvard assumes that everyone's family members can afford to take off work in the middle of the week to travel to Cambridge for graduation.

It would have been just as easy to schedule graduation for a Saturday or Sunday. In that way, family members and friends would have been spared business travel, hotel and car rental rates, which tend to be much more expensive than weekend rates. Furthermore, many airlines require Saturday-night stays. For this reason, Harvard's inconsiderate planning has priced graduation out of many people's budgets.

For those families who do not live in the New England area, the travel time by car or train will effectively require family members to miss work for an entire week. In many cases, this is not possible. For example, my mother is a grammar school teacher. To require her to be absent from her own classes during the last week of the school year is not feasible.

Certainly, many Harvard students have families who are in economic situations that enable them to leave town in the middle of the week to attend graduation. Regardless, it is a crime to limit graduation to those of us who do. Such thoughtless planning reinforces Harvard's stereotype as a university reserved for the privileged elite.

For a school that presumably prides itself on the diversity of its student body, to restrict graduation ceremonies to the financially privileged is simply inexcusable. Rebecca Eisenberg   Harvard Law School, 3L