Igor Urbancik ’02

April 10, 2001

Harvard Students Should Be Grateful

To the editors:

While I enjoyed Alex F. Rubalcava’s tongue-in-cheek letter to incoming president-elect Lawrence H. Summers (Opinion, “Burning Money,” April 9), it also made plain to me a disturbing trend I have found in my own thinking and some other Harvard students I know as well: a feeling of entitlement. For example, subsidized coursepacks would be nice, but there is no reason we deserve them. They are on reserve at the libraries, and thousands of students at other schools, as well as a fair number of our own, can’t afford books, coursepacks or plain texts. We have a right to available resources, but not to free books.

Housing is another issue not mentioned directly in the article, but in others. Visiting other schools, I have found three students in a space not much larger than a Harvard bedroom (which never stands unaccompanied by another room, not even, I believe, in singles). There is nothing about Harvard students that makes us deserve larger amounts of space than other students.

I also find myself grumbling about coursepack prices or the lack of comfortable seating in Loker. But it is important to make a clear distinction between desert and desire here. Particularly in the light of the hard work put in by Har’d CORPS and the Progressive Student Labor Movement, the insistence that Harvard students, already the recipients of so much luck even to be here, deserve what really can be well described as luxuries, turns from a bit silly to rather sour.