It's obviously a question of perspective, which happens to bring me to Perspective, Harvard's liberal monthly. This year, Perspective began hosting discussion forums on feminism, on gay issues, on politics, and publishing the transcripts. The funniest thing about these forums--Perspective editors joke about it all the time--is the participants' near-pathological need to qualify everything they say according to their racial and sexual particularities. "Speaking as a straight white male..." "Coming at it from a Black gay angle..." As if their opinions had no relevance otherwise. As if we couldn't understand "where they were coming from" without knowing the color of their skin, the gender of their sexual partners.
So on one hand--the "university" hand--you have the banality of Depeche Mode "People are people, so why should it be; that you and I should get along so awfully?" It's not so banal when it comes from a victim of racial injustice like Rodney King, who held a press conference to jump-start the national healing process. "Can't we all get along?" he asked.
On the other hand--the "diversity" hand--you have the opportunity for discovery of self and discovery of heritage, along with the danger of insulation and tribalism; You have access to a heightened appreciation of the unique characteristics of those "unlike" yourself, at the risk of obscuring the simple, shared qualities of human beings that help us get along.
Diversity is no less important than "university," but we're getting force-fed one without the other. And as a straight, white, skinny, blue-eyed, pro-choice, Long Island raised, Clinton-supporting, commitment fearing male journalist with a gay roommate and a bad haircut, I'm worried.
MOST OF MY FOUR YEARS at Harvard have been spent along the Canaday-Sever-Lemont-Crimson-Quincy axis, so I've probably walked in and out of the Yard through Dexter Gate 1000 times. Everyone knows the Charles Eliot inscription on the way in--"Enter to Grow in Wisdom"--but I'd bet I'm one of a handful of Harvard students who have memorized the inscription above the exit--"Depart to Serve Better Thy Country And Thy Kind."
Yet another Cambridge commonplace we've heard a million times is that the Harvard students of today are the nation's leaders of tomorrow. That's kind of unsettling. Around here, whites and people of color get along fine in sections, in rooming groups, in social settings. But in the arena of public discourse, they're at each other's throats.
Hypersensitivity and hyperdiversity are part of the problem. The challenge, I suppose, is to find a satisfactory way for all of us to serve our country (presumably, diffusing racial antagonism would be a good start) while serving "our kind" (presumably, this would not preclude the diffusing of racial antagonism).
These ultraserious, touchy-feely, namby-pamby pleas for unity are not my style--I've always been abrasive, sarcastic, rhetorically overwrought and damn proud of it. But race relations will be our generation's defining issue. Somehow, the subject does not seem the slightest bit funny to me. And anyone who sat in Sanders Theatre that icy February night would agree.
Michael R. Grunwald '92 was the editorial chair of The Crimson last year. Speaking as college newspaper editors, we wish him well.