Ad Board as Orwellian State

I am writing in regard to the article published in The Crimson on Feb. 21 about the Administrative (Ad) Board which every once in a while meets and decides the fate of naughty students. Who sits on this committee we don't know. All I know from friends who have stood before it is that it is all white. Even it's rulings are secret. Each year only a list of violations and penalties is published with no names or descriptions of the offenses.

Thus shrouded in secrecy and echoing days past, the Ad Board hands down its decisions. With no college students on the board, people who haven't been students in generations are judging the fate of our peers. This committee views under-age drinking as warranting probation and smoking marijuana as warranting withdrawal. Do these things twice, and you may never see Harvard again.

The members of the Ad Board fail to realize that Harvard--despite how much they might dislike the idea--is no longer in the 1950s. Because the penalties the Ad Board assesses are so harsh, the rulings it hands down are a patchwork of different penalties and it is only the unlucky--not the most guilty--who get punished.

The Ad Board's penalties force students to drink in the closets with the lights out or to hold parties constantly in fear that the proctor is suddenly going to break in and round everybody up. The University's zero-tolerance policy toward alcohol and drugs does not decrease consumption on campus but pushes it into the unlighted and locked rooms of the Yard, the Grille and the Final Clubs. Seedy establishments, but the only places where it is safe for one to drink. Is this good? No! It breeds unhealthy drinking habits.

I am not proposing that pot be given out in Ec 10. Instead, I am proposing that Harvard take a less harsh view of the forbidden pleasures of growing up and show more compassion toward its students. Many other universities have taken this approach and their campuses have not turned into drug dens and moon-shine distilleries, nor have their students become druggies. Living in the Yard reminds me of an Orwellian state--not of the college I dreamed about. --Dorian Berger '00