Harvard and the Sexual Revolution

Hampshire, Berkeley and Brown universities all try to claim the mantle of the progressive, revolutionary university. Eliminating directed-study Core-like requirements or any requirements at all, democratizing who can teach and what qualifies as education, these universities have pushed forward in so many areas.

One of the most important areas deals with questions of sexual parity. Co-ed dorms, floors and even rooms have been held up to scrutiny as the sign of truly egalitarian relations between members of the student body, regardless of gender.

However, in the steeped halls, or rather basements, of our very own Harvard is another Harvard first that has gone unnoticed, neglected from its important place in the history of equity in collegiate life.

Until now. Come, ye pilgrims, down the spiral staircase to nowhere leading down from the Lowell House dining hall, enter the tastefully unmarked doors, into the bathroom. Mirrors on one wall conscientiously placed above sinks, a row of stalls on the right and urinals tucked behind a wall; this is the monument to the co-ed bathroom, a sense that a community that eats together can share all aspects of that experience.

In the end, Hampshire, Berkeley and the rest are right; the intellectual environment is improved when one must contemplate why, in the auto-pilot of self-absorption that is washing and drying hands, we stop in our tracks at the sight of a woman exiting one stall and a man entering the next-why these two Harvard students, equal under the veritas, stand momentarily and wonder at each other. This truly is the meaning of liberal education.

In this era of incorporating the former Radcliffe-affiliated institutions more fully into Harvard College, the half-century of Lamont Library, too, can be celebrated by ending the every-other-floor confusion of bathrooms in that library, built for a single-sex Harvard community, and creating a truly momentous statement of the new-found Harvard unity of male and female, study and life. Come share the bathroom with your student body.