Living in a Material World

He addressed his father as "Sir," she called her dad "Phil." His father was "in" with the Dean at Harvard Law School, hers baked pastries or, rather, cookies. There was a Harvard building christened with his surname; her Italian last name, Cavilleri, had too many syllables and hard vowels for it to be an issue. But in 1970, WASP-extraordinare Harvard student Oliver Barrett III and foul-mouthed Radcliffe student Jenny Cavilleri fell in love in Love Story. Almost three decades later, Good Will Hunting paired up another well-to-do Harvard undergrad with another from a lower social class; she was a well-off only child, he was a Southie.

But how many other Love Story-esque stories--stories that cross that ignored and unspoken line of economic inequality--exist within our Harvard bubble? How many of us have close friends not only of another religion, race or ethnicity than our own, but who also hail from a different tax bracket?

The Harvard undergraduate community is meant to represent a microcosm of today's world. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions has done much to make our collective student body span across religious, ethnic, class and geographic lines with acknowledged diversity. But if we were to examine the "families" that we establish for ourselves here at Harvard, by means of our friendships, our romantic relationships and even our blocking groups, it would become glaringly obvious that we don't branch out much from that with which we are most familiar.

As a student body, we have progressed within the realm of racial and ethnic diversity. Although it happens with less frequency than could be hoped, interracial dating, mixed dining hall tables and diverse rooming groups exist on campus. More important, it's no big deal when it happens, however irregularly that may be. Who knows? Randomization may have yielded positive results after all.

As we pat ourselves on the back for such "improvement," we must bear in mind that issues concerning racial diversity are an encouraged part of our national dialogue. Because of America's abominable attitudes toward minorities in the past, we have developed a hyper-conscious concern about ethnicity and race that is now ingrained in our morals. In much the same way, we have learned to extend the same open-minded compassion to various religious groups on campus. And though lagging significantly behind in terms of acceptance, sexual orientation is at least part of an open and honest discussion at Harvard.

Wealth, in contrast, is most certainly not--even though Harvard students' diversity of experience and opinion is due to our broad range of financial privilege at least as much as to racial or religious diversity. No one talks about our economic diversity, however, because discussing it makes us terribly ill at ease. Why does it make us so uncomfortable to talk about our differences in wealth and class status? Could it be that the rich at Harvard finally feel guilty about their advantages and privileges in ways that they have never before been forced to consider? Or that the penniless, who have never before confronted such gratuitous displays of wealth, suddenly have black-tie formals, Final Club punch seasons and Freshman Facebook statistics--including irrelevant home addresses and high school alma maters--thrown in their faces?

We should address issues of wealth and economic diversity on campus because they affect us and enter our undergraduate bubbles more often than we would ever like to admit. Last Saturday, for example, was the annual City Step dance. Individual tickets went for $15 a pop and black-tie was the presumed dress code. Even after dancers had already shelled out that much cash, however, questions regarding money were not put to rest; while some couples could afford to dine in swanky downtown restaurants, others ate their meals in the dining hall, and whereas some people splurged on taxis, other students had no choice but to take the T.

We attend a school in which half the student body can spend money without thinking twice and the other half can't spend a dime without thinking about anything else. In fact, I only know of two groups who openly talk about wealth on campus: the Fendi baguette-toting students who have it and wear it like a badge, and those who don't and wear that as a badge.

At Harvard, no one talks about wealth, no one addresses the issue, and no one helps us understand how to come to terms with this particular type of diversity. The College offers but one meal plan to its undergraduates in the hopes that instead of confronting and evaluating a genuine social problem on campus, the dining halls will bring students together, acting as the great equalizer to combat our disparate affluence. It is telling that the Committee on House Life releases detailed information about the number of Varsity athletes and blacks in each blocking group, but no data explaining the distribution of wealth in each group of friends.

It may well be that the College is scared of what we can all predict would result. In a 1928 report, after all, President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, argued that students should never be allowed to control their housing for the same shameful reason: "Large communities tend towards cliques based on similarity of origin and upon wealth. Great masses of unorganized young men...are prone to superficial currents of thought and interest, to the detriment of the personal intellectual process that ought to dominate mature men seeking higher education."

I ask the College to release that data, proving that despite a faade of ethnic, religious and geographic diversity, economic stratification continues to reign on the Harvard campus.

Jordana R. Lewis '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.