It’s one thing to offer an etiquette class to incoming students lacking the social graces one expects of a Harvard student. It would be even more useful to help students coming from environments where their experience is nothing like Choate-Rosemary Hall to fit in. After all, there aren’t many kids from the South Bronx who can chat amiably about their favorite restaurants in St. Germaine.
There is a real issue to be addressed in bringing together people of very different cultures and social experiences, and there is no doubt that the diversity students, much as they may be embraced so the woke white kids can have a black friend to prove their allyship, know that they’re not like them. But learning how to wear khakis doesn’t mean you get to demand that Harvard rename Mass Ave. to St. Nicholas Boulevard.
We’re tired. We’re busy with classes, homework, and extracurriculars. But we still took the witness stand in the federal Harvard admissions trial on Oct. 29, doing something that most college students have only seen in television shows. We spent countless hours preparing with lawyers, talking to media, and organizing our peers to rally and march because we ardently believe in the importance of educational justice and accessible higher education for students of all backgrounds.
But while it is imperative to defend diversity in admissions, it is not enough to worry about who the school admits. Harvard must also ensure that all students are supported and well-equipped to thrive once they arrive on campus.
You’re tired? Welcome to life, kidz. You’re busy? You’re supposed to be. You testified? Well, aren’t you swell. Let’s assume you testified truthfully, rather than as a performance for the benefit of some cause, like “educational justice” whatever that’s supposed to mean, because otherwise you’re a perjurer. And if you testified truthfully, you don’t win a prize. That’s what witnesses are supposed to do.
To say that Harvard “must” do anything is a bit presumptuous. Or what? You’ll quit? You’ll call Harvard bad names? You will march around the library? To say that students should be “supported and well-equipped to thrive” is banal, more empty verbiage of the sort so loved by the vapid. What, exactly, is it that you want, that you claim you need, that you’re not getting?*
We demand a robust and interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies Department.
We demand staff and faculty that value and represent the diversity of the Harvard student body.
We demand accessible spaces that validate and address the needs of marginalized students.
We demand more opportunities for students to engage in meaningful public service that aims to not only champion and develop student leadership but also to address community needs.
It might have seemed sufficient to the administrators at Harvard that they were trying hard to provide an opportunity for students who would otherwise have no chance whatsoever to gain admission to one of the most elite schools in the world, as if this was about Harvard’s noblesse oblige to the poor and downtrodden. What were they thinking?
If you don’t like the classes Harvard offers, don’t go there. Harvard has the second best engineering departments on Mass Ave. If that’s not your thing, then why are you there? They have a few decent academics left on campus. You care how they look? They look competent. Of course they don’t look like you, as you aren’t competent yet. But with some effort, you might be.
You want a space to validate you? Because matriculating at Harvard isn’t validating enough for you?
Harvard may win this lawsuit, but Harvard is nothing without its students. Harvard cannot successfully “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” unless all students are adequately supported to thrive and succeed in ways that are personally meaningful to them.
Harvard was doing pretty well before you showed up. They should help you to survive in the deep end of academia, but you want to turn it into the kiddy pool? Learn to swim, kidz. That was the entire point of admitting you to Harvard. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other kids who would be happy to take your spot.
*Protip: The time to make demands is before you give them what they want. Have you learned nothing from Michael Cohen?