Over the last 30 years, minority students have created a space for themselves, through their own action and self-organization, to share their experiences and battles, cultivate their own identity, and remind each other they are not alone at Harvard.
Now, lower-income students need spaces of their own, too—surely more than the fourth-generation members of final clubs need theirs. And ultimately, we all need spaces to interact on a more equal footing, ones that don’t require an unlimited credit card for the purposes of friendship, learning, and living.
This is not a call for mere sensitivity, for pity, pieties, or political correctness. But some basic decency and a new openness towards all our fellow students would be nice. That, and a bold challenge to the class hierarchies still alive and well on our fair campus.
John Harvard, tear down this wall.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky ’07 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.