Letter to the Editor: Winthrop and Diversity

To the editor:

Prof. Stephen Peter Rosen's recent letter about diversity in Winthrop leads me to highlight two more aspects of Winthrop's diversity. The original article seems to accept an important but fairly narrow understanding of diversity.

Although we are some of the "white males" mentioned in Robert Proctor's original article, as far as I am know, my husband and I were, at the time, the only openly gay couple in the tutor system when we were hired in 2005. Although there was a pair of LGBTQ House Masters at the time, we constituted the full set of gay people in committed co-habitation among that strange species of grad and professional student known as "tutors." And this was more than a year after marriage equality became legal in Massachusetts.

Upon being hired as a couple (by Prof. Rosen, I add), an old friend of mine, who finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1961, noted that it was fitting that Winthrop should be the house to hire a gay couple. When he was a grad student, Winthrop was known as the house "open to Romans and Jews" back in the days when other houses commonly discriminated against Jews and Catholics. We felt proud to be part of a tradition of diversity—not only of race but of religion, culture, and sexual minority, too—so proud that we held our wedding reception in Winthrop.

Nathan A. Paxton, who received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard in 2010, was a tutor in Winthrop House from 2005 to 2009.