But just occasionally, among themselves, they tell their thoughts. "I know what they say about white, Protestant Southerners coming from the Bible belt, and all that, but I tell you, this is just not our kind of people up here," one confided.
Remember, however, that the number of Southern students who thus actively broadcast their discontents is relatively small. A far greater number, indeed the majority, attempt a quiet, less dogmatic approach to the integration problem. Perhaps it is because their manner is more relaxed and their conclusions less dogmatic that they form the generally unheard Southern voice.
This second group of Southern undergraduate opinion differs from the first chiefly in that it recognizes a problem in the present segregation practices of the South, yet generally disapproves of the current measures designed to abruptly end segregation.
At the opposite end of the poll the third group of Southern students at Harvard represent the fair-haired children of the Arkansas Gazette and the Northern press in general. These are the "enlightened" Southerners with opinions born in the South and crystallized upon exposure to Harvard's benign influence.
"I love the South now, understand that," one student from Georgia began, "but they're kidding themselves down there. The South has got to grow up."
Harvard May Not Change Minds
Quite possibly a Harvard education does not substantially affect the opinions and certainties of any of these three groups on the matter of segregation. An ardent supporter of school segregation will read Brown vs Board of Education in Government 1 and emerge more convinced than ever of the unsoundness of the decision.
"Where they refer to six sociologists there...why, three of them have been cited for Communist activity."
The Southern liberal reads the same brief and finds in it only new proof of his position.
As with all students, Harvard provides Southerners with the advantages of a superior Liberal Arts education, but this education sways the Southern view on segregation--pro and con-scarcely at all. The College can provide them no formula for arriving at a single unchallengable answer and so each goes still his private way.
Perhaps the greatest educational benefit of Southerners attending Harvard is bestowed on their Northern and Eastern classmates who learn that the Southerners' ideas and ideals, however divergent, are based on reasoning and sincere conviction and are not just the product of the Theodore Bilbos.