Showing the Real Harvard

During Harvard-Yale weekend, Cure Lounge, a club on Boston’s tony Tremont Street, shut down a party for black students and alumni of both schools after it discovered that the majority of the guests waiting outside—in cocktail attire—weren’t carrying Harvard or Yale identification cards. An email from Michael Beal ’06, a second-year student at Harvard Business School who helped organize the party, accuses the club and its officials of racism; the club management insists that it shut down the party because of the other young people in line, “bad people” who “couldn’t spell the words ‘Harvard’ or ‘Yale’” and who might “cause trouble.”

Although Beal maintains that club officials told him his party might attract “local gangbangers” and the “wrong crowd,” there is simply not enough information to pass judgment on the thought processes of those club employees who made this decision. However, regardless of whether racism actually played a role in the events of last Saturday, the occurrence still seems an appropriate window through which to examine the way those outside the University’s gates perceive the Harvard student body. The history of race relations at Harvard is not a pleasant one, and although Harvard itself has become much more sensitive to racial issues in the recent past, the world's perception of America’s oldest university has not changed as significantly. For many, Harvard is still the mythic territory of white male elites, and this particular incident—whether or not the Cure Lounge can be called “racist”—is nevertheless an opportunity for the University to combat the popular misconceptions of what Harvard is and to whom it belongs.

First and foremost, that Harvard and Yale IDs were requested from these students and graduates suggests an uncertainty about whether they could actually belong to communities as hallowed as those of the two most prestigious universities in the United States. While we hope that such uncertainty didn’t stem from the fact that these students and graduates were black, it’s all too common for those not acquainted with the current amount of racial diversity at places like Harvard and Yale to misconstrue what today’s Harvard student actually looks like. Indeed, the typical Harvard student is no longer the wealthy Oliver Barrett IV from “Love Story,” nor is she the well-to-do Skylar from “Good Will Hunting.” In fact, there is no typical Harvard student of today whatsoever—white, black, or otherwise. But no matter how clear that fact may be to members of our community, a string of events in recent years indicates that the University would do well to communicate this message more thoroughly to an audience much wider than just its current students and faculty.

In 2007, the infamous “Quad incident” saw the Harvard University Police Department interrogate black students gathered on the Radcliffe Quad; in the summer of 2009, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. was arrested outside his house in Cambridge after having been presumed to be breaking into his own home. These events—within the last three calendar years—all substantiate the need for better University communication on what people affiliated with Harvard look like today. In both of these additional cases, black students and faculty were afforded, as Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. argues in a recent book on the Gates affair, “the presumption of guilt.” In that sense, even though the perception of Harvard as the property of the white elite still seems to exist outside Harvard Yard, the onus is nevertheless on the University itself to portray its student body as it is now, not as it was a number of years ago in an era that a dwindling number of Harvard affiliates would even recognize.

Of course, as Ogletree also notes in his book, the University has already taken several steps over the years to show the world that there is no typical Harvard student or faculty member, at least not anymore. In general, we appreciate the University‘s establishment of a Dean of Diversity and its commitment to diversity in faculty hiring and student acceptances. Specifically, we strongly support President Drew G. Faust’s 2008 establishment of a special review to “consider how best to assure the strongest possible relations and mutual understanding between the Harvard University Police Department and Harvard’s highly diverse community.” Other developments, such as the creation of a University Safety Advisory Committee and a public-safety ombudsman duty within the Ombudsman’s office, also warrant significant amounts of praise. Finally, the recent move to diversify Harvard’s portrait collection is similarly an excellent means of altering the public image of the Harvard affiliate on the most literal level.

We regret, however, that these initiatives—as noble and as necessary as they are—might not be enough for the potential damages caused by events like the “Quad incident,” the arrest of Professor Gates, and, most recently, the Cure Lounge shut down, whether or not it was a “racist” decision. As Ogletree himself wrote in an e-mailed statement to The Crimson Editorial Board last night, “If this were an isolated incident, that might be different. When it continues to occur, that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of current and former students. We have a lot of work to do to learn from this episode and ensure that it does not happen ever again."