This is Autocracy!

At President Drew Gilpin Faust’s installation ceremony on Friday, Undergraduate Council (UC) President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 bust out the populist rhetoric, insisting that, “This process of decisions made behind closed doors, this disempowerment of students, this denial of citizenship must end now.”

He is not the first to highlight Harvard’s democratic deficit. Last spring, protestors in Harvard Yard representing the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) pointed towards Massachusetts Hall, which houses the University President’s office, and cried out, “This is what autocracy looks like,” and then, pointing towards themselves added, “this is what democracy looks like.”

Petersen, SLAM, and the slew of student commentators with similar opinions have got one thing right: Harvard University isn’t very democratic. The majority of decision-making power at Harvard, as in most other universities, lies with a few appointed officials who are relatively insulated from student opinion.

However, caught up in the glory of their cause, the College’s budding political philosophers have forgotten the more important question: Why should Harvard be democratic? After all, the vast majority of institutions in this world—businesses, sports teams, law firms, armies, hospitals, high schools—aren’t very democratic either. And like these organizations, Harvard University isn’t a government; in fact, it’s a corporation.

Unfortunately for all the undergraduates disappointed about losing the UC Party Fund, a college administration doesn’t depend on popular will for legitimacy. Instead, Harvard’s governors derive their authority from the fact that all of us have consented to come here to learn and to enter into a system where we don’t make the rules but are expected to follow them. When Ryan Petersen boldly cries out, “I refuse to accept that this is a faculty and administrator’s world!” he rails against a system that he explicitly consented to participate in with the inscrutable immaturity of someone who pays for a guided tour and then refuses to follow the guide’s route.

Of course, Harvard’s administrators should try to respect student opinions—it would be impossible for the College to accomplish its mission of fostering academic and personal growth if faculty and administration failed to respond to any student concerns. But when administrators make unpopular decisions, it is foolish to complain of student “rights” being violated: Such rights never existed in the first place. The idea that a student must approve of all decisions made regarding his welfare is a fallacy born of a lifetime’s exposure to a culture that teaches us that “democratic” is synonymous with “good.”

So if Harvard’s autocracy has got you down, feel free to leave. But if you take the T to MIT you’ll find another autocracy. And another if you head down the Mass Pike to New Haven. And if you take a plane over to Oxford, the birthplace of the university system, you won’t find anything more democratic there either. This—college education—is what autocracy looks like, and there’s nothing wrong with that.



Daniel E. Herz-Roiphe ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Adams House.