The Red Line

After seven semesters on The Crimson’s editorial board, including two as an op-ed editor, I would like to use my very last piece as a Crimson columnist to reflect on the role of student journalism at Harvard.

Last spring, as a member of the Undergraduate Capital Campaign Task Force, I had the dubious privilege of being one of the first to hear Harvard’s newest fundraising pitch. I was struck by the Capital Campaign’s emphasis on the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the expense of the humanities or social sciences—and by its strange ideas on how to push forward “Teaching and Learning” initiatives. A year later, I am concerned that Harvard has its priorities wrong—our university continues to seek millions of dollars for “twenty-first century classrooms” while ignoring true obstacles to excellent undergraduate education.

In the past year, our university officially launched the creatively-named “Harvard Campaign,” which seeks to raise $6.5 billion across the university. Harvard has made public its intention to raise $2.5 billion for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including $450 million earmarked directly for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; according to my most recent email from Dean Pfister, we’re more than halfway to that goal. The Harvard Campaign as a whole has identified several “aspirations” to which it encourages alumni to donate. These include “Meaning, Values, and Creativity,” “Integrated Knowledge,” and “Teaching and Learning.”

Harvard’s fundraisers told the Undergraduate Capital Campaign Task Force that the campaign priorities reflect what excites donors. Apparently, at least in the minds of Harvard’s fundraising staff, Harvard’s alums are thrilled by science and gadgets. The “Teaching and Learning” section of the Harvard Campaign relies on the rhetoric of technological progress, using phrases like “innovation in pedagogy,” “emerging insights,” and “the transformative potential of the digital age.”

Brasil Timber Limited, Empresas Verdes Argentina, and Scolopax—these sound like the names of corporations you might learn about in a course on “Globalization and Agriculture.” In fact, they’re all timber plantations that Harvard University fully owns.

After suffering a huge drop in its endowment in 2009, Harvard Management Company, the subsidiary that manages Harvard’s $32 billion endowment, has sought ways to “diversify” its holdings. In recent years, this has meant purchasing and managing dozens of timber plantations in the developing world. Although these plantations have different names, local managers, and business practices, many seem to follow the same model. On each timber plantation, a large amount of land is acquired, cleared, and planted with a monoculture of fast-growing trees like eucalyptus or pine. These trees are harvested in a rotating cycle and sold to make paper or wood products.

It’s the first day of class after spring break. First-years are still giddy about their housing assignments; sophomores and juniors have started scoping out desirable suites for this spring’s room lottery. House pride at Harvard is real and strong. But what are the limitations of the House system—and what would happen if more students were to move off-campus?

As every Harvard undergraduate was reminded this month, all Houses were not created equal. Physical structures determine many of the differences between houses: Mather guarantees sophomore singles; Adams, Lowell, and Quincy are close to the Yard; Eliot and Winthrop boast back gates onto the River. These are not simply aesthetic matters. Only a few houses include the option of living in the DeWolfe apartments, which boast kitchens and air-conditioning. Even fewer houses are wheelchair accessible.

Harvard just appointed a new college dean with lots of background in leadership but little experience in undergraduate education. Rakesh Khurana has taught a class on “leadership and organizational behavior” at Harvard Business School for years but his dual appointment in the sociology department was created only earlier this year. I respect Dr. Khurana as a person, but I’m perplexed that someone who has never taught Harvard undergraduates was chosen as Dean of the College.

Perhaps, then, this is a good time to interrogate the role of the university administrator. How should someone’s academic qualifications prepare them to run a modern university? Does the modern corporatized university require corporate leadership?

Two years ago, Staples tapped Drew G. Faust for its board of directors. On its website, the office supply company touts her “extensive leadership and management experience and skills related to recruiting top talent, capital planning, financial oversight, risk management, technology and strategy.” Faust has spent her entire career in universities—first as a professor, then as an administrator. Apparently, Faust’s “extensive … management experience” and skill in “financial oversight” comes from her time as dean and then president at Harvard.

In July 1971, Harvard psychology professor Richard J. Herrnstein penned an article for Atlantic Monthly titled “I.Q.” in which he endorsed the theories of UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, who had claimed that intelligence is almost entirely hereditary and varies by race. Herrnstein further argued that because intelligence was hereditary, social programs intended to establish a more egalitarian society were futile—he wrote that “social standing [is] based to some extent on inherited differences among people.”

Over the break, something really important happened at Harvard Library. It didn’t get covered in The Crimson, or even in the Gazette, but Harvard Library changed its admittance rules so that children under 16 can enter Widener’s stacks when accompanied by an adult with a Harvard ID. I want to tell the story of how this happened, because I think it illustrates something important about Harvard, institutional momentum, scholarship, and motherhood.

Mia You, a graduate student in English at the University of California at Berkeley, lives in Cambridge with her family, including her baby daughter. About a year ago, You walked into Widener Library to do research for a review of a new edition of “Little Women.” She planned to get a few books from the stacks—but was told, as she swiped her library card at the stack entrance, that she couldn’t enter: her baby daughter was strapped to her chest, and children under 16 are not allowed in the stacks.

Two weeks ago, You wrote about this incident for the literary journal “A. Bradstreet.” She explains that she did eventually get ahold of her books—a student worker in Circulation fetched them for her—yet she missed out on the important and valuable scholarly experience of browsing bookshelves.

Harvard College loves to brag that it provides all undergraduate students a liberal arts education. As a campus tour guide, I frequently tell prospective students interested in “business,” “pre-med,” and “communications” that at Harvard, they can pursue these interests in their summers and their extracurricular time—but in class, they will get the chance to study history, theory, ethics. In fact, our Economics department seems almost proud that so many students each year cross-register at MIT to take “Corporate Financial Accounting” for its relevance to investment banking: Not offering an accounting course somehow seems to prove our university’s commitment to the liberal arts. We will teach economic theory, not practical applications, in our classes.

Yet Harvard College may have to revisit its vision of itself as a “liberal arts college.” From the growing number of apparently pre-professional undergraduate classes to the expanding School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, our College does not seem to have a coherent idea of what exactly counts as a liberal art.

Clearly, Harvard undergraduates frequently take pre-professional classes. For one, undergraduates are encouraged to cross-register at Harvard’s professional schools. I know pre-law students who have studied Contracts at the Law School, pre-med students who have anesthetized pigs at the Medical School, and budding politicians who have studied policy at the Kennedy School. In addition, Harvard’s Undergraduate Teacher Education Program, which I admire, licenses graduates to teach in Massachusetts public schools (and in the many states with which Massachusetts has reciprocity) after students take classes at the Graduate School of Education and complete multiple semesters of in-school observation and student teaching. Harvard obviously has no policy against undergraduates taking pre-professional classes.

80 percent of students who voted in last week’s referenda voted “yes” on a questionasking whether Harvard University should advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. “Comprehensive immigration reform” refers to a federal plan to, among other things, provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented Americans—including the family members of the young adults who have already qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which provides a means for undocumented students and veterans to reside in the country and find jobs without fear.

This referendum made sense for all the reasons stated by its sponsor, Harvard College Act on a DREAM. They argued in the UC’s “pro” statement that Harvard previously supported the DREAM Act, which has now become part of a larger comprehensive immigration bill; that “hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the country” already advocate for comprehensive immigration reform; that  “if immigration reform fails to pass this year, the 40 undocumented students currently at the college will be left with no legal avenue to adjust their immigration status.” Yet I still find it interesting that there was such a strong student consensus that Harvard should support comprehensive immigration reform—which might include spending money to lobby US Congress.

After all, what does it mean for our university to engage in lobbying?

At The Harvard Shop, where I work part-time as a sales associate, Harvard ID holders get 20 percent off almost everything in the store. In practice, people who make use of this discount are usually first-year undergraduates, middle-aged adults in expensive two-week executive education programs, and Harvard staff who desperately need an umbrella on their way to work. Sometimes, though, I run into boundary cases. A research assistant at a Harvard-affiliated hospital. A contracted worker with a temporary access pass that looks like a student ID. Do these people hold Harvard IDs? It’s a question that should never come up outside of the very constructed situation of The Harvard Shop’s discount—but who holds a Harvard ID might have significant implications for “who belongs” in the Harvard community.

A few years ago, Aviva Chomsky wrote a short essay on the oft-unquestioned privilege of holding a U.S. Passport. Chomsky notes, “When you get your U.S. passport in the mail, it comes with a flyer that says ‘With your U.S. passport, the World is Yours!’”—yet most who can easily obtain a U.S. passport don’t even realize the extensive access and legal protection they gain by holding one. I am afraid that in Harvard’s growing empire, the Harvard ID may come to take some of the same significance of the U.S. passport in allowing access to space and power.

Two years ago, while the students and workers of Occupy Harvard set up a tent city in Harvard Yard, our administration shut the Yard off to all but Harvard ID holders. Although Harvard administrators professed their concern for student safety, in practice, this policy excluded reporters, tourists, and Cambridge residents who have walked through Harvard Yard on their way to work or school every day for many years longer than I’ve been a student. The policy also, for a time, excluded Extension School students, who do not all have Harvard IDs.

Yesterday, as I was sitting in the lobby of Emerson Hall, a youngish man came up and asked where he could find the psychology department. I pointed him across campus to William James Hall, rolling my eyes just a little bit—after all, Emerson does have “PHILOSOPHY” engraved in stone above its front entrance.

Perhaps this man was a very confused prospective graduate student. Perhaps, though, he was simply reading a map from the first half of the 20th century: From its construction in 1905 until the opening of William James Hall in 1946, Emerson Hall housed most of Harvard’s psychology library and laboratories. In fact, for many decades, philosophy, natural science, and experimental psychology were incontrovertibly disciplinarily connected.

Some historical legacies linger long past their due dates. Harvard was founded by and large to serve the white male ruling elite of New England. Today, despite the best efforts of the Admissions Office and student organizing, our university’s centuries of exclusivity remain patently obvious. They are visible everywhere from the portraits on the walls of Annenberg to the valorization of the “Western canon” in our social science classes to the persistent lack of diversity among University faculty.

Last month, I got an email from a recruiter. An associate of Teach For America, citing a minor leadership role in a student organization as evidence that I “have distinguished [myself] as a leader here on Harvard’s campus,” asked me to meet with Harvard’s TFA representative on campus. Dropping phrases like “race and class,” “equal opportunities,” and “educational injustice,” the recruiter promised that I could have a significant impact on a classroom in an underserved community.

I have thought for many years about teaching high school history. But I stopped replying to this email after a few exchanges.

I am not interested in TFA.

In an exceptionally long and widely reported statement last week, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust explained Harvard’s continued justification for not divesting from fossil fuels. I’m not a member of Divest Harvard, and for now, I’ll leave a more thorough response to those who know more about the campaign. But one thing about Faust’s refutation stood out to me as a glaring misrepresentation of reality. Far from a passive, un-situated, and apolitical revenue generator, Harvard’s $33 billion endowment is extremely political.

What counts as politics? A first-year student in economics might assume that politics is simply what happens in the Capitol and the White House. A historian would point out that there’s much more to politics than simply legislation and elections; gender, race, and the capitalist system are all political issues, both at work and at home. Certainly, “economics” and “finance” are never separate from politics. I don’t believe that Faust has been acting as an administrator for so long that she’s forgotten the basics of a historian’s methodology.

Yet it appears that she has. In her letter, Faust wrote, “the endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.” However, when Harvard’s endowment invests in certain industries—especially when it invests disproportionately in one industry, or invests in controversial industries—it may be trying to make money, but it is also making a political statement. Right now, by supporting fossil fuels, the endowment is advancing right-wing goals. Divestment activists want it aligned with the progressive values of Harvard University and its students.

It’s punch season, the time of year when sophomore guys, convinced that the only way they will ever gain access to the social capital they have heretofore been denied on campus, roam the streets of Cambridge in suits and other strange costumes. Final clubs, the centuries-old single-gender institutions whose facades dominate Harvard Square, are not only spaces where club members can eat, relax, and network with well-connected alums. Along with a few other Harvard-affiliated institutions, they also host the largest and most visible parties on Friday and Saturday nights in Harvard Square. They are just one example of how sex and politics are inextricably and destructively linked on Harvard’s campus.

Final clubs have been lambasted by some activists and journalists for their reputation as sites of sexual assault. For example, a 2010 Crimson scrutiny notes, “Phoenix president Byron T. Lichtenstein ’11 says he believes that the clubs are tied to the issue of sexual assault because the College depends on them to host parties for undergraduates. ‘The clubs are a social space, and until Harvard has more social spaces there’s always going to be an association between the final clubs and being afraid of sexual assault,’ he says.” But although the potential of high sexual assault rates at final clubs is alarming, it’s not the topic of this article. Instead, I’m interested in the fact that final clubs are sexual spaces at all.

Final clubs are best known to the majority of campus as buildings, owned and controlled by men, which admit women only for certain events—most commonly, parties. If Lichtenstein was right when he said that the clubs are now a predominant social space on campus, then one of Harvard’s main social spaces is one which only men have ownership over, and to which women are only welcome as guests.

Ten years ago, in response to student activism, Harvard created the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. Three years later, after student demands, it inaugurated the modern Harvard College Women’s Center. Most recently, just two years ago, Harvard funded the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, also in response to organized student outcry. Today, these offices all do important work on campus, filling gaps in student life programming and representation that were undoubtedly felt keenly before. However, they also force students to address a difficult question: How much of feminist and queer work on campus can be done from within the institution?

Historically, Harvard students have organized in multifarious ways around queer issues on campus. The Queer Resource Center is a student-run safe and useful space for queer students. Gay, Lesbian, or Whatever interrogates the intersection of queer and of color identities; BAGELS, a group that I’m part of, interrogates the intersection of queer and Jewish identities. Queer Students and Allies traditionally organizes queer-friendly dance parties as well as political campaigns on and off-campus. The Trans Task Force addresses issues for trans* students, faculty, and staff. Informal coalitions of students regularly gather to address such issues as the return of ROTC to Harvard and its implication for the queer community, or the inappropriate nature of the former freshman-year sexual assault training, “Sex Signals.” These groups all banded together three years ago to demand that the University provide more resources for queer students, a call that resulted in the creation of an Office of BGLTQ Student Life in spring of 2012.

In the past year, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life (which students have started calling the Quoffice) has filled an important space on campus by organizing mixers, open houses, and panel discussions for students, and trainings and discussion spaces for student leaders and University administrators. Before the Office of BGLTQ Student Life instituted jobs for interns each semester, I don’t think there was any regular student employment doing work around queer issues on campus. And perhaps most fundamentally, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life presents itself to the Harvard community as a part of the administration open to addressing concerns about queer life on campus, a first place to turn to for students and workers who encounter problems with University Health Services, lack of gender-neutral housing options, or other forms of discrimination.

Last semester, Tara Raghuveer ‘14 and Jennifer Zhu ‘14 ran for Undergraduate Council President and Vice President on a platform that called on the University, among other things, to consider the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality as a department. Harvard’s upcoming capital campaign, which has received great coverage in The Crimson during the past week, seemsa fitting path to a department of gender studies.

There are many parts of the capital campaign that deserve and in fact require student input. (For example, I’m confused by the notion that funding priorities that don’t excite donors “are tweaked or eliminated during the vetting process”—what about funding parts of this University that may not excite Harvard’s wealthiest donors?) But for this column, I would like to focus on the implications of one possible funding target. What would a WGS department mean for the role of feminist and queer thought in our university?

As an undergraduate WGS concentrator, I would of course love WGS to receive department affiliation. The arguments for a WGS department are compelling. Currently, the Committee on Degrees in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality has none of its own graduate students—and also has no permanent faculty. My professors either hold joint appointments with other departments, meaning that they must split their time and intellectual commitments with other social sciences and humanities, or they are visiting faculty. This gives the concentration little continuity and means that there is little research published from Harvard that focuses solely on gender or sexuality. It also means that WGS is dependent on other departments to decide if they want their faculty to take joint appointments with WGS. Currently, there are no feminist economists or feminist philosophers offering classes regularly in the WGS concentration. Despite the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus’s amazing work to establish the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality and despite the popularity of WGS General Education classes like Robin Bernstein’s “Race, Gender, and Performance” and Caroline Light’s “Sex and the Citizen,” it often feels as if WGS is figuratively as well as literally shunted off into the University’s basement.

I want to stray a little bit from the general theme of my column and address this piece to my professors, three of whom have recently written me kind emails or spoken to me about my performance in class. Although all have assured me that my comments in seminar are smart, insightful, and productive, they have told me something similar—that if I want to be taken seriously, I should change the way I speak.

I think that they should change the way they listen.

Indeed, it’s a lesson often shared with, usually, young women. We have been trained, or socialized, to speak in a “feminine” way—ending our sentences with question marks instead of periods, inserting “like” or “you know?” every few words, speaking quietly, and qualifying our assertions with phrases like “I’m not really sure if this is relevant, but” and “…sorry that was so incoherent; someone else could probably say that better.” Well-meaning mentors, ranging from teachers, to bosses, to older students, often advise women like me on how to be more respected, gain more credibility, or hold people’s attention and regard more effectively—usually by telling us that we should stop qualifying our remarks, end our statements more decisively, speak up, drop the “like,” and take up more space in conversations. Essentially, this lesson means that if we speak in a feminine way, we will not be respected—and to be respected, we must speak more like men.

As Harvard takes the lead on a bold new plan “to reach out to students of all ages, means, and nations,” using the latest technology and the power of Harvard’s name to distribute knowledge across the globe, I’ve found myself wondering—why am I not more excited about edX?

Its themes of democracy and progress, coupled with the promise of redistribution of power through education, seem exactly the sort of things that a leftist university student like me would swoon over. Yet I still feel slightly uneasy with edX’s promise to reform both Harvard and global education through an online platform. Perhaps this is because of the assumption that everyone in the world wants to access Harvard professors’ knowledge, and perhaps it’s because of Harvard’s supposition that simply making information available online will reach students “of all means.”

I’ve heard many critiques of edX and its attempt to rapidly revolutionize the world of online courseware. Someone more knowledgeable about the inner workings of the edX technology might point out that expanding an online learning platform to encompass more than a dozen universities in less than a year is an unsustainable rate of growth, or that Harvard and other universities need to raise funding and build infrastructure to organize online classes before they can hope to effectively serve one million (if not one billion) students.

I would bet that this academic year has been the Faust administration’s hardest to date.

Every university faces its share of critics. Harvard has had many in the past year, ranging from the nearly 200 faculty members who signed a petition decrying the University’s response to Occupy Harvard last year to the tens of thousands who called on Harvard not to appoint former Mexican President Felipe Calderon to a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government earlier this semester. But although responses like these may put uncomfortable pressure on a university, none have rocked national news headlines and put quite so much public heat on the Faust administration as this year’s cheating scandal.

What made the cheating scandal a “scandal” instead of simply a routine university response to academic dishonesty? In part, the national media loves a story about Harvard, especially one that makes our famed university look bad. But I believe Harvard’s current administration may have fallen harder than it had to: The cheating scandal and the story of Harvard’s poor follow-up sharply cracked the façade of perfection that the Faust administration has been working hard to maintain. When all Harvard administrators speak with one voice, our university loses both the value of open discussion and the resilience of a community that welcomes internal dissent.

My concentration is apparently the most satisfying one at Harvard: Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality is known for its small class sizes, excellent advising, and wonderful community. Even so, I used to feel nervous walking into the WGS office to meet a professor—until I learned that WGS’s program coordinator would always warmly greet me. This semester, each time she walks out of her office to talk to me about my coursework or my life, thte WGS coordinator updates the sign on her office door with a new sticky note: “245 days without a contract!”

Like 4,600 other members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, the WGS coordinator has been working without a wage raise since June 2011. Sadly, Harvard's ongoing negotiations with its clerical workers demonstrate a fundamental lack of respect for the people who make Harvard run. Whether negotiations focused on health care, size of the bargaining unit, or wages, Harvard has sent the signal that respecting workers' time and lives is not a top priority for our university.

Harvard administrators have repeatedly made public statements asserting the fairness of their wage offers. For example, Harvard has noted that “compensation is on average at the 75th percentile.” (Harvard has not cited any sources for this number—and the average worker’s wages were predicted to rise 3 percent last year, making Harvard’s wage raise offer below average.) Harvard Director of Labor Relations Bill Murphy argued that “Our benefits still rank in the top 25 percent, so we think it’s a fair and reasonable offer.” These numbers raise important questions: Does this pool of compensations include all clerical workers, or just those at academic institutions? Does it include only unionized workers, or also workers without union representation? And most importantly, when does Harvard ever think it reasonable just to be in the top 25 percent?

Harvard’s Dexter Gate beseeches Harvard students to “go forth to serve thy country and thy kind.” President Faust seems to echo this plea at every Commencement, encouraging students to engage in public service through programs like her Presidential Public Service Fellowship and the Center for Public Interest Careers. But as more students consider “going forth to serve,” it’s important to think about what, exactly, it means to do public service after graduation.

It’s well known that Harvard students disproportionately go on to work in investment banking and consulting after graduation. This fact has caused consternation to everyone from New York Times blogger Catherine Rampell to Occupy Harvard to Ezra Klein. But in recent years, the Ivy-to-Wall-Street pipeline seems to have slowed: The percentage of Harvard students who reported going into consulting or investment banking after graduation has declined from 47 percent in 2007, to 39 percent in 2008, to only 22 percent in 2011, according to The Crimson’s annual senior survey. There are many possible explanations for this: Perhaps the financial sector seemed less attractive after the financial crisis of 2008; perhaps the encouragement of Harvard administrators and student activists has actually paid off.

At the same time, the percentage of students entering “public service” jobs immediately after graduation seems to have increased. For example, The Crimson reported that 11.4 percent of students who graduated last spring went into education. A survey by the Office of Career Services presents a similar trend, also suggesting that the number of students working in the nonprofit industry immediately after college rose from 4 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2011.

Last month, the students, alumni, and workers in the Responsible Investment at Harvard Coalition won a great victory: President Drew G. Faust announced that Harvard would, for the first time, create a Social Choice Fund to invest designated alumni donations in a socially responsible manner. This is certainly an important step—and the fact that more than 450 people donated to the Fair Harvard Fund last spring indicates how many alums want Harvard to invest its money for social good. Harvard’s speedy acknowledgement of this interest bodes well for the future of student activism.

Yet, one important detail of Harvard’s announcement has thus far been largely overlooked. Although Harvard will create a Social Choice fund on July 1, this fund will not be part of Harvard’s $31 billion endowment and the Harvard Management Company will not manage it. Instead, Harvard has cleverly maintained the position of its endowment as removed from moral or ethical considerations. Members of the Harvard community must keep working if they truly want our university to use its money responsibly.

Harvard invests its endowment with principles generally in accordance with modern portfolio theory, which requires that no limitations be placed on the investments a fund can make in order to maximize returns. Although environmental, social, and governance considerations may come into play when the university considers the long-term sustainability of an investment, the Harvard Management Company fundamentally makes investment decisions simply based on what it thinks will earn it the most profit.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across an article in the Crimson from 1953 entitled “The 'Cliffe Girl: An Instructor's View.” The article quotes a number of Harvard professors and graduate students speaking about their thoughts on women in their classrooms, 10 years after joint instruction required Harvard professors to teach men and women at the same time. For example, the article notes, “Most of the instructors noted that the women are good, solid, conscientious, and rarely brilliant; they strike a steady mean, while the men tend more to extremes.” The instructors also suggest that Radcliffe women can be a “source of embarrassment” in the classroom, and one told the Crimson, “they read too much, remember too much, and don't chow it over,” in comparison with men.

This story is fascinating because it is both unfamiliar and very familiar. Students at Harvard today read about outmoded concepts of gender from sixty years ago and laugh—isn’t it silly that professors thought women “rarely brilliant,” or that Harvard was so concerned about teaching fellows marrying their students that it would not let unmarried men teach sections of women? Yet 1953 was not all that long ago, and I think it’s important that we not brush aside the lessons of history.

The Harvard of the 1950s looked rather different than the Harvard of today. For one, the only women at Harvard were workers, secretaries of professors, and maids in the Houses. Female students were enrolled in Radcliffe College and lived in dormitories in the Radcliffe Quad. Each year, each Radcliffe student received a copy of the Radcliffe Red Book, which detailed not only administrative structure and rules for fire drills, but also sexual mores: women were not to smoke on the street, they shouldn’t wear blue jeans in public, and they could only have Harvard men in their dormitories during certain set “parietal” hours each day.

In 1997, Harvard revealed that it had secretly purchased over 50 acres of land in Allston, the Boston neighborhood right across the river from Harvard’s Cambridge campus. In an effort to appease angry residents, who felt that Harvard had deceived them and feared what would happen to the neighborhood with Harvard as landlord, the University promised that it would use the purchased land to stimulate business in Allston—primarily by building a large Science Complex on Western Avenue. Unfortunately, since then, Harvard’s interactions with Allston have demonstrated that it does not respect its neighbors and its neighborhood.

Harvard broke ground on the Science Complex in 2008 while pledging to give back to the Allston community by turning Allston’s Barry’s Corner into a vibrant neighborhood. Unfortunately, when Harvard’s endowment plummeted during the financial crisis, the University decided to halt construction on the Science Complex indefinitely. The building’s foundation has sat basically untouched in the middle of Allston since 2009. A post in Boston’s community news site Universal Hub ironically notes, “Harvard is listening to residents not looking forward to a decade of living near a crater” by proposing that attractive bushes be planted around the site. To further compensate Allston residents for the revenue lost by their community, Harvard has kindly erected a miniature golf course and provided rat-proof trash cans to Allston residents. How generous.

Of course, Harvard hasn’t done everything wrong. Plans to relocate the Charlesview housing complex have gone ahead bumpily, but steadily. Allston residents expressed optimism that the old Charlesview site would feature an arts and cultural center to benefit both Harvard affiliates and Bostonians. And this year, Harvard finally announced plans to restart development of what will now be a “Health and Life Science Center” in 2014. After pressure from the Harvard-Allston Task Force and Harvard community members, it has also released further plans for development in Allston. Most recently, Harvard has proposed updating its Institutional Master Plan to build a new basketball stadium in Allston, among other things.

Last month, the Crimson Coalition organized students to run for Undergraduate Council seats and reform the UC. Members of the Coalition called for increased student power, envisioning the UC as a vehicle for undergraduate input in University governance and community issues. Even without winning a majority on the UC, the Crimson Coalition did raise an important question that has shaped student discussion about the UC this semester: What, after all, is the role of an Undergraduate Council?

Should Harvard’s UC represent student concerns about University governance to the Harvard administration? Recently, students have explored the UC as a tool for institutional change. For example, this semester, the UC had “an unprecedented 150 applicants for around 60 spots” on student-faculty committees, two-thirds more than last year. This UC election will also feature an unprecedented three student-initiated referenda of the ballot, suggesting that student activists view the UC as an important vehicle for organizing and expressing student opinion issues ranging from endowment ethics to sexual assault policies on campus.

This year, four tickets are in the running for UC President and Vice President positions. As candidates seek student group endorsements and student votes, they will be asked to articulate their visions for the UC’s role on campus. In fact, only two days into campaigning, many already have. For example, candidates Spenser R. Goodman ’14 and Darren C. McLeod ’14 have declared that they view the UC as a strictly student-life organization. Their platform states that, if elected, they will consolidate the UC’s resources into a Social Programs Committee and the Finance Committee, focusing on dances, parties, and other events. Similarly, Tara Raghuveer ’14 and Jen Q. Y. Zhu ’14’s platform notes, “The most important function of the Undergraduate Council for student organizations is funding for their programming.”

Last month, the Harvard Gazette, Harvard’s official newspaper, published a story entitled “Back to basics: Army cadets work out at Harvard for the first time in 41 years.” The article notes that, for the first time since the Vietnam War era, Harvard students enrolled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps are training on Harvard’s campus.

Ignoring the fact that the women’s soccer team has probably been doing “high knees” for years, the Gazette fondly describes the exercises done by ROTC students, including push-ups, sit-ups, and high knees, which it describes as a “heart-pumping exercise that resembles skipping.”

Last month’s story was the sixth story about ROTC published in the Gazette in the past year, compared to just seven stories in the same amount of time about the Phillips Brooks House Association (which involves many hundreds of students in public service each year) and a single story on Occupy Harvard. Clearly, Harvard’s official mouthpiece has made a concerted effort to publicize one of Harvard’s newest student organizations, the Reserve Officer Training Corps Association.

Last week, both the The Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Gazette published stories about the Harvard’s library transition. Although both articles quoted some of Harvard Library’s administrators applauding the achievement of the “completed” reorganization, the Crimson’s article discussed an important side of the library transition story that was notably lacking in Harvard’s official account: the stories of the workers in Harvard’s libraries.

What exactly “transitioned” in Harvard’s libraries in the past eight months? Most apparently, the library now has a new centralized website, which allows students to more easily find the hours and locations of libraries. But if we want to see the real changes that have occurred in Harvard Library, we need to look beyond its shiny new website and examine the values underlying the reorganization. Indeed, Harvard has rearranged the library workforce—in order to make the Harvard Library more “efficient.”

Last March, I wrote in an article in Perspective Magazine that Harvard administrators’ discourse around the library transition focused on efficiency, cost-cutting, and profit margins. Indeed, concern about costs seems to have dominated the library reorganization. Robert M. Angilly, a library worker, told me that as part of the transition, consultants came into his workplace, the Frances Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design, where he has been working for over 30 years. The consultants searched for ways to make the library work more efficiently. According to Angilly, “They had the idea of pulling a structure they had used elsewhere kind of out of the hat and applying it to this problem.” He told me, “I just get the feeling they’re applying a corporate model on an academic environment, and it is not entirely applicable.”

Harvard prides itself on its accessibility to low-income students. Indeed, Harvard’s financial aid packages are some of the best in the country. For example, students whose families make below $65,000, like 62 percent of families in the U.S., pay basically nothing for their Harvard education.

Yet Harvard’s student body is still much, much richer than the average group of American residents. As Justin Lanning ’12 noted in The Crimson last year, calculations based on information from the Harvard Financial Aid Office “come to the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households. Even more shockingly, only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes and a mere 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles of U.S. incomes.” Despite the Financial Aid Initiative launched in 2004 and the efforts of Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, Harvard still has relatively few working- and middle-class students.

Of course, some of this disparity is due to Harvard’s admissions practices. For example, Harvard’s Admissions Office still considers legacy status in its admissions decisions, which advantages students whose parents have not just attended a university, but have attended Harvard, one of the most exclusive universities in the country (and financial aid packages weren’t nearly as generous one generation ago). Harvard also uses the SAT as a measure of aptitude, despite data suggesting that SAT scores correlate strongly with family income.