Friends with Money, and Principles

To the editors:

James K. McAuley’s editorial comment (“Friends with Money,” Mar. 8, 2010) was crude and ill thought out.  The Crimson Opinion page should be in the business of publishing reasoned and fact-based discussions of important campus and world events, not anecdote and invective filled criticisms of our fellow students.

Mr. McAuley’s piece is grounded in his belief that rich students at Harvard are consciously reducing the level of their consumption in order to demonstrate to their less wealthy peers that they are not immune from the current “economic hardships” most Americans are currently experiencing.

The essay’s attack on the children of the “American socioeconomic elite” rests on conjecture and not a single statement of fact other than an imperfect perception of general campus trends. It suggests that to predict someone’s morality and future conduct all we need to find out is how much money his or her daddy makes. This is just as inappropriate as the commonly held but false belief that Americans on welfare are lazy good-for-nothings looking for a taxpayer handout.

Mr. McAuley somewhat bitterly assumes that rich students are “insulting” the rest of us when they deign to live on a budget and that they do not learn anything valuable about careful spending habits.  To make his point, Mr. McAuley criticizes rich Harvard students who take the T instead of taxis, who frequent sales racks instead of high priced stores like the Tannery, and who prefer to eat in dining halls rather than patronize expensive restaurants. It is a perverse and undeserved assault.

In my view, this is admirable behavior that demonstrates restraint and self-moderation. Why does he insist on characterizing it as insincere? Would he rather that they rent stretch-Hummers and spray Dom and Henny on us poor plebs as they drive by? Would this be in the true nature of rich Harvard students, as Mr. McAuley sees them?

Mr. McAuley ends his essay with a discussion of a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald about the rich: “They are very different from you and me.” I will bring my own letter to a conclusion with a line from Hemingway written in response to the very one that McAuley quotes: “Yes, they have more money.”

Nick Nehamas ’11

Cambridge, Mass.

Mar. 8, 2010

Nicholas A. Nehamas ‘11 is a classics Concentrator living in Mather House.