At Harvard, no one talks about wealth, no one addresses the issue, and no one helps us understand how to come to terms with this particular type of diversity. The College offers but one meal plan to its undergraduates in the hopes that instead of confronting and evaluating a genuine social problem on campus, the dining halls will bring students together, acting as the great equalizer to combat our disparate affluence. It is telling that the Committee on House Life releases detailed information about the number of Varsity athletes and blacks in each blocking group, but no data explaining the distribution of wealth in each group of friends.

It may well be that the College is scared of what we can all predict would result. In a 1928 report, after all, President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, argued that students should never be allowed to control their housing for the same shameful reason: "Large communities tend towards cliques based on similarity of origin and upon wealth. Great masses of unorganized young men...are prone to superficial currents of thought and interest, to the detriment of the personal intellectual process that ought to dominate mature men seeking higher education."

I ask the College to release that data, proving that despite a faade of ethnic, religious and geographic diversity, economic stratification continues to reign on the Harvard campus.

Jordana R. Lewis '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.