On Tolerance

To the Editors of the Yearbook 1981:

As one with an interest in good writing, I do not read the Lampoon and I do not remember having looked at a Yearbook during my 20 years at Harvard. However, there is a first time for everything. This week some students asked me to read the Adams House section of the Yearbook, and I must tell you that I found the attempt at humor stale, offensive and inappropriate.

I gather that you have been surprised by the reaction this piece has stirred. Perhaps it will help if I explain my own attitude toward it and what I consider to be your insensitivity in allowing, it to be printed. Any joke when repeated too often becomes stale. When it is directed at particular groups of people over and over again, it begins to pick up in hostility what it loses in humor. When the groups of people at which the joke is aimed also are the targets of actual (not merely verbal) forms of discrimination, then it becomes offensive and even painful. If you still do not understand this, I suggest that you ask a woman or a Black or a Pole or a South Boston Irishman to explain.

That gay students or racial minorities or foreign students feel at home in Adams House is a matter of great pride to me. But the real news is that they feel at home along with large numbers of other students in the House who do not fit these categories. Given the state of the world, our country and the city of Boston in the year your book commemorates, this seems to me no mean achievement.

Some have tried to separate the slurs against the European students in the House from those against homosexuals. I wish that I could do this, but I fear there is a connection that has a sadly familiar echo from the American past. There is a "know nothing" ring to the association of "weird" with "foreign," "pretentious" with "artistic" and "eccentric" with "homosexual."

By now you must think this is a very long letter about a short and probably unintentionally controversial article. But enough is enough. As Master of Adams House, I am tired of seeing a splendid group of students humiliated by disparaging labels. And as a teacher, I am disturbed by the Philistinism, anti-intellectualism and moral vacuity that infers that creative talent, high scholarly achievement and respect for individual differences are a strange and ridiculous combination in a university. Robert Kiely   Master of Adams House   Professor of English