It’s one thing to offer an etiquette class to incoming students lacking the social graces one expects of a Harvard student. It would be even more useful to help students coming from environments where their experience is nothing like Choate-Rosemary Hall to fit in. After all, there aren’t many kids from the South Bronx who can chat amiably about their favorite restaurants in St. Germaine.
There is a real issue to be addressed in bringing together people of very different cultures and social experiences, and there is no doubt that the diversity students, much as they may be embraced so the woke white kids can have a black friend to prove their allyship, know that they’re not like them. But learning how to wear khakis doesn’t mean you get to demand that Harvard rename Mass Ave. to St. Nicholas Boulevard.
We’re tired. We’re busy with classes, homework, and extracurriculars. But we still took the witness stand in the federal Harvard admissions trial on Oct. 29, doing something that most college students have only seen in television shows. We spent countless hours preparing with lawyers, talking to media, and organizing our peers to rally and march because we ardently believe in the importance of educational justice and accessible higher education for students of all backgrounds.
But while it is imperative to defend diversity in admissions, it is not enough to worry about who the school admits. Harvard must also ensure that all students are supported and well-equipped to thrive once they arrive on campus.
You’re tired? Welcome to life, kidz. You’re busy? You’re supposed to be. You testified? Well, aren’t you swell. Let’s assume you testified truthfully, rather than as a performance for the benefit of some cause, like “educational justice” whatever that’s supposed to mean, because otherwise you’re a perjurer. And if you testified truthfully, you don’t win a prize. That’s what witnesses are supposed to do.
To say that Harvard “must” do anything is a bit presumptuous. Or what? You’ll quit? You’ll call Harvard bad names? You will march around the library? To say that students should be “supported and well-equipped to thrive” is banal, more empty verbiage of the sort so loved by the vapid. What, exactly, is it that you want, that you claim you need, that you’re not getting?*
We demand a robust and interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies Department.
We demand staff and faculty that value and represent the diversity of the Harvard student body.
We demand accessible spaces that validate and address the needs of marginalized students.
We demand more opportunities for students to engage in meaningful public service that aims to not only champion and develop student leadership but also to address community needs.
It might have seemed sufficient to the administrators at Harvard that they were trying hard to provide an opportunity for students who would otherwise have no chance whatsoever to gain admission to one of the most elite schools in the world, as if this was about Harvard’s noblesse oblige to the poor and downtrodden. What were they thinking?
If you don’t like the classes Harvard offers, don’t go there. Harvard has the second best engineering departments on Mass Ave. If that’s not your thing, then why are you there? They have a few decent academics left on campus. You care how they look? They look competent. Of course they don’t look like you, as you aren’t competent yet. But with some effort, you might be.
You want a space to validate you? Because matriculating at Harvard isn’t validating enough for you?
Harvard may win this lawsuit, but Harvard is nothing without its students. Harvard cannot successfully “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” unless all students are adequately supported to thrive and succeed in ways that are personally meaningful to them.
Harvard was doing pretty well before you showed up. They should help you to survive in the deep end of academia, but you want to turn it into the kiddy pool? Learn to swim, kidz. That was the entire point of admitting you to Harvard. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other kids who would be happy to take your spot.
*Protip: The time to make demands is before you give them what they want. Have you learned nothing from Michael Cohen?
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Certainly a degree from there doesn’t get one the respect it once did, but that’s not entirely Harvard’s fault.
Certainly? You’re sure? Really sure? It’s fun to pick on Harvard, and some of that is well deserved. But what’s your evidence, if any, that Harvard degrees get any less respect in the real world now than they used to? You know, where it counts: grad schools, potential employers, etc.
IANAHG
Harvard has an 86% graduation rate for four year students, one of the highest in the nation. And for students who for some reason or another, take six years to complete matriculation, the graduation rate for all races and ethnicities is over 91% with students of color averaging 96%.
These stats are for the classes of 2017 and 2019 respectively, according to Scholorship dot com . Is this person complaining because the rate isn’t 100%?
Reading is FUN-damental, Mike.
Maybe they just don’t find graduating from Harvard to be “personally meaningful” enough.
Well, it should be 100%. After all, the painstaking Harvey admissions process has ensured that only the very breast and bitest students in the universe are present on the campus. (It may well be only that which prevents the administrators saying something like, “Piss off, you little vermin”).
These kids shouldn’t stop until Harvard gives them a Yale degree.
You win today.
My coffee must not be working today…i recognize all the words, as they are in English, but i can’t for the life of me figure out what, “accessible spaces that validate and address the needs of marginalized students.”……i was thinking maybe just give them a guitar and a street corner?…
There are some damn fine musicians playing on the streets around Harvard Yard.
GREAT song, Scott. I heard a David Crosby cover of it years ago, worked up a good version of it for myself and…it just didn’t work in the dives i was playing. It was really frustrating, trying to give em some real art….a slower tempo song with real meaning….and from the peanut gallery?…”play Free Bird”…( i gave em the bird, and it was free…)
It kind of hits home with me as a private criminal defense lawyer, as well.
Some times and places, there is just no substitute for the theme from “Rawhide.”
The dives weren’t as bad as “Bobs Country Bunker”…no need for chicken wire. …but still…i should have done Stand by Your Man, instead of Joni.
Frankly, I prefer the original Johnny Western rendition of the Paladin/”Have Gun-Will Travel” theme.
Fun Facts: 24 of 225 episodes were written by Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry.
Decades later, “Have Gun-Will Travel” creator, Sam Rolfe, would return the favor by writing an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, called “The Vengeance Factor”.
Have we ever discussed that this isn’t your blog, that this isn’t a platform for shit CL prefers and CL’s factoid contributions? Are you angling for an equity partnership here, because we can always discuss terms.
I hope they remembered to add the formula, “These are DEMANDS, not requests,” that keeps the Harvey administrators from being confused about that sort of thing.
I can’t help but think Harvard might have less of these kinds of problems if they focused on the ‘educating’ and dropped the focus on the ‘citizen-leaders’ part.
But not being able to claim the dubious credit for shaping our leaders might make them sad.
Would that not impugn their unwarranted self-esteem?
Do you mean this would hit Harvard, or the little darlings, sorry leaders of tomorrow?
I was kinda hoping it would hit both.
The easiest way to handle the toothless demands of lightweight terrorists is to ignore them.
Why must you diminish their self-worth by being weightist?
As an esteemed St Louis City Judge once said …..”No one takes your demands seriously…..until you kill a hostage”.
These kids are soft. These are more like strong suggestions at best.
…funny, when i read the list of ‘DEMANDS’ i thought, ‘so do they have hostages?… guns?…what?
…oh, wait…i’m getting a text msg. ….
Nietzsche is dead. Regards, God.
Guitardave,
You misread the text of the message as well as the sender. It was from Franz Kafka assuring you that the meaning of life is that it stops.
All the best.
RGK
L.O.L!!…I stand corrected, your Honor.
Their grandfathers had non-negotiable demands in the 1960s.
They sound like they’ve been offered an “etiquette class”, only of a different kind.
It’s sad when diversity efforts result in “educating” minority students into the groupthink and empty talk of social justice.
I suspect some might tell you, “Like the leper said to the prostitute, ‘keep the tip’!“
I personally prefer the mohel version of the joke, but that’s just me.
I’m not sure I’ve heard that variant?
The only one with a mohel that comes to mind (although, I know there are many) is, after making someone wait a long time…
“Like the mohel said after the bris, ‘it won’t be long now’.”