The Red Line
Institutionalizing Queer
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.
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?
EdX, The Great Equalizer
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.”
Harvard’s One Voice
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.
