Fight Fiercely Harvard

THIRTY YEARS AGO, my father marched into Harvard Yard, threw his mortarboard into the air, and was welcomed to the company of educated men in a ceremony about which he now remembers close to nothing.

Right now it's difficult for an imminent graduate to imagine that this week and the other high-water marks of my four years here will ever be an indistinct memory. But 30 years is a long time. When my father lived in Matthews Hall and Winthrop House, maids--known to everyone as "biddies"--made his bed and cleaned his rooms every day. During the fall of his sophomore year, the College tried an experiment--replacing the maids in Dunster House with student porters. It was not a popular change: Dunster residents complained that the service was deteriorating, and the chief of the Harvard employees' union charged that the University was unfairly putting his rank and file out of work. "Cleaning rooms is a woman's job," he argued.

My father can't remember taking a single class where the instructor was a woman. That may not be a lapse of memory: there was only one tenured woman on the faculty at the time. She was one of the first women to win a lifetime appointment here, thanks in part to a feisty benefactor who endowed a chair on the condition that it be filled by a female scholar. The professor, a medieval historian named Helen Maud Cam,learned as many lessons at Harvard as she taught. In her first years here, she was barred from attending morning services at Memorial Church; only after a struggle did she coax the church into bending its men-only rule for her.

In those days, too, barriers were sturdier at Lamont Library, which was officially off-limits to Radcliffe students. So were all Harvard dormitories after 8 p.m.

In 1952, a distinguished Harvard English professor wrote an article in Mademoiselle magazine calling "college girls" politically apathetic, thirsty for security, and devoid of intellectual curiosity. A few days later, 25 Radcliffe students picketed outside the professor's home. "Dig this challenge to your intellectual curiosity," read one of their placards.

Harvard in the 1950s was a place where students could go to Sanders Theater and listen to a serious debate on the merits of desegregation. Arguing for the negative, a visiting journalist from the Winston-Salem Journal insisted, "Advancement for the Negro can best come gradually." His opponent, Thurgood Marshall, went on to prove him wrong in the year of my father's graduation, successfully arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of a Topeka schoolgirl named Linda Brown.

One night during the winter of my father's sophomore year, a pair of freshmen put a match to a wonden cross in the north end of the Yard, behind Holworthy Hall. A crowd soon gathered around it, and while some of to them tried to extinguish the flames, others heckled a Black student who had the bad fortune to he walking past the scene, and shouted their disappointment when the fire finally went out. The two freshmen were eventually disciplined by the College and stated, in a public apology: "We honestly say that the incident was meant only as a prank and sincerely felt that the incident would be passed aside as harmless...We did it for a little excitement."

The summer after my father's freshman year, Harvard's president, James B. Connel '12, looked to the future in a speech before the American Chemical Society. "The year 1984," Conant said, "does not glare with menace in my crystal ball."

WAS CONANT'S reading accurate? Today, no Harvard professor would make demeaning generalizations about Radcliffe students in print. But in the last five years three Faculty members have been officially punished for sexually harassing a student or colleague. An extensive survey released last fall revealed that more than a third of all female students and teachers in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences felt they had experienced sexual harassment.

It's not surprising that only three incidents have come to light: almost none of the victims lodged formal complaints, the survey found. Many said they feared reprisals, or worried that the University would be unreceptive to their case, or did not know where to complain. Did Harvard find merit in any of the few charges it received, and take measures against the offender? That's an absolute secret, according to official policy. (The three known cases were publicized by the victims and their friends.)

Today every University facility and dormitory is open to women. But there are still rooms at Harvard that women may not enter--the secret cloisters of the college's nine all-male final clubs, where the genteel intolerance of the 1950s still flourishes. Many of the clubs, moreover, enjoy the indirect or direct support of the College administration, in areas such as steam and telephone service at reduced rates and official assistance in organizing their annual fall selection process.

Almost all of us graduating tomorrow, unlike so many of my father's classmates, have studied with women instructors, even though right now they make up less than five percent of the tenured faculty at Harvard. On the other hand, a great many of us have never had Black scholars as our teachers--the Faculty currently numbers five at the tenured level and none at all at the junior level.

Today the thought of a cross burning in the Yard defies the imagination. But anecdotal and statistical evidence both suggest strongly that minority students are still not always made to feel welcome here. During my freshman year the president of the Black Students Association arrived at the group's office one day and found "KKK unite" written on the desk calendar. Shortly afterwards, she began receiving obscene phone calls and rape threats. And over the four years my class has been here, the yield for minority students--the percentage of those admitted who decided to come here--has dropped almost ten percentage points. For Black students the yield has dropped more than 20 points in that short period of time.

Does the year 1984 glare with menace at Harvard? I don't think it does: Since my father's days here. Harvard has obviously progressed by enormous leaps towards fostering a more tolerant undergraduate community. Still, if 30 years down the road I should happen to be the father of a member of the class of 2014, sitting in the Yard and trying to remember the details of my own commencement. I hope the progress will be just as obvious.