A SANER ADMISSIONS POLICY

Harvard’s September decision to end early admissions reaffirmed the University’s place at the forefront of efforts to expand diversity in higher education. With a single admissions pool, it should become considerably easier in the coming years to attract a truly socio-economically diverse applicant pool, building stronger and more balanced classes.

Early admissions programs, whereby a student applies in November and receives a decision in December, unfairly advantage the already advantaged. The early applicant pool is traditionally admitted at around twice the rate of the regular pool—meaning that Harvard’s already intimidating admissions statistics look even grimmer for regular applicants, with as little as six percent of the regular pool admitted. As a result, applicants with little knowledge of the admissions process and even less guidance with which to navigate it—applicants who also tend to come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds—face an unnecessarily high burden when applying that has nothing to do with their academic ability.

We hope that this experiment will be vindicated by increasingly diverse and exciting classes of future Harvardians. Princeton and the University of Virginia have already followed Harvard’s lead; as the evidence accumulates in the coming years, we hope other colleges will be willing to follow suit.

A MIGHTY LIBRARY

Harvard possesses one of the greatest university library systems in the academic world, and much of the credit for its continuing success can be attributed to Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, the outgoing director of Harvard University Libraries (HUL). Under Verba, HUL has become a much more efficient, user-friendly organization, with the launch of programs like HOLLIS, HUL’s invaluable online search tool. Verba has kept Harvard at the cutting edge of library technology, most notably in recent years through collaboration with Google to digitize Harvard’s collections.

Robert C. Darnton ‘60 was recently announced as Verba’s successor. As the head of Harvard’s massive and sprawling network of libraries, Darnton will face the immense challenge of living up to Verba’s legacy and making Harvard’s collection increasingly accessible and usable. The ongoing project of digitization will be the most visisble project of Darnton’s tenure, but less prominent issues such as dealing with budget and space constraints and facilitating online course-packs will have a similarly important impact on Harvard’s students and scholars.

A HOLLOW HUNGER STRIKE

After a nine-day-long hunger strike in May, Stand for Security, a student group founded to protest the treatment of Harvard’s subcontracted security guards, secured a meeting with administrators and a reaffirmation of Harvard’s commitment to worker welfare. The hunger strikers’ goals were laudable—it is vital that Harvard treat its workers, including subcontracted workers, with respect and generosity. We wholeheartedly support Stand for Security’s demands, such as the institution of fair grievance procedures, hiring full-time, instead of part-time, workers when possible, and a higher wage.

Nevertheless, Stand for Security’s decision to protest the University’s inaction through a hunger strike was a foolish and wildly disproportionate response considering the urgency and magnitude of the problem. Harvard is already a relatively generous employer, with its unambiguously worded Wage Parity Policy ensuring that subcontracted workers are compensated at the same rate as directly employed ones, and that wage levels are above the minimum established as a living wage by the City of Cambridge. Though the implementation of this policy has been called into question, progress on the issue should be achieved through reasoned argument and debate, rather than through extremist and attention-grabbing tactics that sensationalize and distort the issue. With the strike thankfully over, Harvard must now live up to its commitments; we hope that it will not try to take advantage of the summer break, with students away and attention diverted, to neglect its responsibilities to its workers.

PROTEST PROBLEMS

Like many guest speakers at the Institute of Politics (IOP), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert S. Mueller III attracted unruly protests when he spoke in April. Nevertheless, the Harvard University Police Department’s (HUPD) heavy-handed response amounted to an alarming break with precedent and procedure.

When four seniors briefly disrupted Mueller’s speech by shouting slogans from their seats, HUPD disregarded Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) regulations stipulating that non-violent protesters be given a warning before they are removed from an event, and instead immediately and forcefully ejected the protestors. Once outside, the four were arrested and charged with disturbing a public assembly, a charge which carries a potential penalty of a fine and up to a month in prison.

While we disagree with the means used by the protesters for getting their message across—we firmly believe that in an academic environment those of all viewpoints deserve a chance to promulgate their views without disruption—we strongly condemn the police’s draconian response. By choosing to disregard unambiguous guidelines emplaced to protect the right to free speech that is so vital to any university’s mission, HUPD risked chilling speech on campus and silencing dissenting views. Thankfully, the University wisely pressed for all charges to be dropped, and a Middlesex County judge dismissed the case in May.

WHO IS HARVARD?

Controversy erupted at a spring reading period cookout on the Quad lawn hosted by the Black Men’s Forum and the Association of Black Women at Harvard. University police, responding to a noise complaint, demanded that students show their ID cards to prove their Harvard affiliation, prompting widespread discussions of racism at Harvard.

Whether or not the Quad residents who called the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) were motivated by subconscious racism, the incident provided a valuable opportunity to reflect on continuing problems with race-relations and the experience of minorities at Harvard.

Though Harvard has made much progress considering its white-dominated past, concerns of the stigmatizing of minority groups raised in the aftermath of the Quad incident suggest that Harvard still has work to do in building a fully cohesive and racially harmonious community.

Progress on that front will only happen when the campus engages in an honest and thorough dialog about race relations. While the incident at the Quad was of course deeply regrettable, it at least served the valuable function of reminding students that complacency and subconscious bias are ongoing problems at Harvard.