Writer Lacks Decency

To the editors:

Gladden J. Pappin ’04 errs when he asserts that condemning Harvard’s actions in 1920 to expel homosexuals “is to declare that the College should not attempt to maintain any level of moral decency whatever” (Letters, “Secret Court Rightly Punished Immorality,” Dec. 9). This is a result of Pappin’s unquestioning confidence in his interpretation of “traditional morality,” an interpretation, which as his language indicates, ultimately rests on repression, discipline and the silencing of other viewpoints and lifestyles.

Moral decency survives at Harvard as University President Lawrence H. Summers’ statement of regret demonstrates. Summers’ statement affirms that homosexual students at Harvard will not suffer from a hierarchy that privileges uniformity and the stifling of individual identity. Expulsion devastated the lives of those forced to withdraw in 1920. The result of discrimination was not a better or more decent university, but the shame and suicide of many of those involved. Pappin’s lack of sympathy for the real and human consequences of his “moral decency” is not just indecent, but deplorable.

Moral decency prospers at Harvard: we are a community acknowledging that a diversity of viewpoints and lifestyles can enrich our lives and dispose us to toleration and amity. Harvard University is a great university precisely because it fosters a climate of pluralism that encourages talented people of different genders, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations and backgrounds to come together from all over the world for the free exchange of ideas in safety.

Pappin’s comments go directly to the heart of who should compose our community. Who will be left out of Pappin’s university? Who amongst our friends, colleagues, mentors and teachers will he cast out beyond the locked gates of the Yard? Mr. Pappin, Harvard is not the Puritan college of 1636 or the New England finishing school of 1920; Harvard is the great research university of 2002. We changed and ceased to fear the diversity and freedom that tolerance permits. So should you.

David A. Smith

Dec. 11, 2002

The writer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History.