What We Do

Harvard is known for its resistance to change, for policies as hard and permanent as the cobblestones that line its pre-revolutionary streets. Altering the status quo requires committees and subcommittees, reports and recommendations. As a frustrated Larry Summers quipped a few weeks ago, “The University is incapable of ordering blackboard erasers in quantities of more than six without a committee.”

Yet, every so often, when the hurdles have been leaped, the bridges crossed, and the red tape cut all the way through, change—for better or worse—becomes as simple as a vote, a raising of hands, a counting of yeas and nays. Such was the case May 7 when the faculty voted to amend the Administrative Board policy on peer-to-peer disputes. Under the new policy the Ad Board will no longer adjudicate claims of misconduct brought by one student against another unless there is independent corroborating evidence to support the claim. As a result, the board will drastically limit the number of so-called “he-said-she-said” rape and sexual assault cases that it hears.

From a legal standpoint, the change is logical enough. Harvard is merely adopting an evidentiary standard that the Massachusetts courts have used for years.

But on a personal level, gut instinct tells us the change makes little sense at all. Over the past several weeks the new policy has come under fire—from faculty claiming that they had little knowledge of the repercussions of their vote and from student groups claiming that Harvard has abdicated its responsibility to punish those who violate the school’s sexual assault policy. Each day, it has become clearer that in some fundamental way the change has shattered our sense of community.

Harvard does not have to be different from the outside world, but it has chosen to be.

Admissions decisions are made in a need blind process, compensating for the economic inequalities that for most of this country’s history made higher education a privilege of the wealthy. Housing assignments are randomized, creating residential communities of mixed race and ethnicity, interests and creeds. And rules are drawn—rules regarding freedom of speech and gender equity, personal integrity and, yes, sexual assault.

Harvard does all this because it strives to be something other than the harshly inequitable world in which it resides, because it seeks to create a community of equals who can learn from and trust each other.

Thus, when Harvard admits its incapacity to enforce the rules that it has established, we feel threatened, we feel vulnerable to the injustices that lurk beyond our ivy-covered walls. More than anything, we feel let down—because while Harvard doesn’t have to be different from the outside world, we have come to expect it to be.

Yet perhaps these feelings are misplaced. For any student who has been at this school for a time—who tiptoed over the legacy of racial, religious and gender discrimination—knows that Harvard policies themselves do not create community. Students do.

Students step outside of self-segregated blocking groups and meet the diverse individuals with whom they have been randomly assigned to live. Students open formerly exclusive social clubs to applications and comps. Students choose to respect each other’s sexual boundaries. Students listen to each other, question each other and care for each other. They give life to the otherwise cold and sterile policies that the administration creates.

This is not to say that policy is inconsequential; students know that to be untrue. Indeed this is why they continue to rally for reform—for equitable social spaces, for diversity of academic offerings and for greater funding for rape education and prevention. But it is to say that if and when those changes are made, they will not themselves make Harvard a better place. That will require the continued vigilance of students who challenge themselves to rise above the comfortable systems of prejudice and inequality to which we are all accustomed.

In three weeks, I will leave the world of Harvard and enter a world that does not try to manufacture community, even superficially. But I will enter this world having learned from Harvard that what matters is not how community and equality are manufactured from above, but rather how they are created from below. I will enter knowing that seemingly immutable policies can change in an instant with the raise of a hand, but that real change is process more enduring and constant—a course that is charted through continual self-reflection, unyielding determination and a commitment to equality and respect stronger than that any regulation could prescribe.

Lauren E. Baer ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. This is her final column.