Oy vey.

IF THERE IS a consistent theme to the Counter affair, it is the participants' willingness--you might say eagerness--to ascribe the worst of motives to their intellectual opponents.

Counter started it by assuming that The Crimson's erratic coverage of minority issues was a result of some kind of a "racial agenda" as opposed to the well-intentioned incompetence that generally pervades our building. We may be woolly-headed, but we're not racists.

Counter's letter was ill-conceived and inaccurate, but in our typically self-righteous knee-jerk form, The Crimson overreacted, escalating the conflict. Instead of talking to Counter and trying to figure out where he was getting his misinformation (from a multitude of students who had come to his office with serious concerns about The Crimson, as it turns out), we trotted out a full page of our standard Armageddonesque anti-insensitivity rhetoric: "unbelievable," "downright scary," "ridiculous," the works.

We didn't say Counter was an anti Semite, but we came damn close. According to everyone who has worked with the man, there isn't an anti-Semitic bone in his body.

How could all of this alienation have been avoided? Basically, the members of this community need to trust each other a bit, to put ourselves in each other's shoes, to give communication a chance before downshifting into ballistic mode.

A newspaper that miscovers minority issues, an administrator who writes an ill conceived letter--these are things to talk about, but they aren't evidence of racism or anti-Semitism. Those are strong words, and people around here tend to abuse them. This isn't war. There's no need to demonize the enemy.

In all honesty, nobody on either side of the Counter debate believes that Jews are greedy or that Blacks are stupid. Was somebody offended by somebody's letter? Well, let's assume that no offense was meant until we learn otherwise.

Was somebody "insensitive"? Aw, for heaven's sakes, let the sensors apologize, let the sensors suck it up, and let's all get on with our lives. Name-calling and resignation demands and I-said-you-saids aren't going to make anyone feel any better.

SO MUCH for sensitivity. Now let me say a few equally dismissive words about diversity.

Diversity is the highest good at Harvard. It's celebrated, worshipped, whacked over the heads of the student body. We hear it again and again: Harvard is so diverse! Everybody here is so different! Different races, different religions, different activities, different home states, different home countries, even different sexual orientations! You might befriend a Black lesbian poet from Denmark! Or a Japanese-American tennis player from Iowa! Think what you might learn from such diverse people!"

I'm not arguing that diversity is bad. Clearly, few of us would want to attend a school where everyone shared the same color, creed and interest.

But here's another thing I've learned from diversity at Harvard: Different people aren't necessarily that different after all. Ms. Denmark and Mr. Iowa can probably find a lot of common ground. They're not aliens, after all. They're people.

This is not particularly earthshaking. I heard it a million times on Sesame Street long before I ever heard of Harvard. But Harvard is so obsessed with its celebration of diversity, the variety of individual life experiences that set us apart, that it forgets about what might be called university, the commonality of human existence that brings us together.

Instead, we identify ourselves with our group--BSA, BGLSA, Hillel, The Crimson--and define ourselves in opposition to other groups. So some members of the BSA insist that The Crimson send a Black reporter to cover its elections, arguing that white reporters necessarily lack the "sensitivity" and "understanding" to grasp minority issues. So The Crimson assumes that non journalists just don't understand how to run a newspaper.