Word: aldriches
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...dean, their complaints rarely reach more than a handful of people at the University, much less the world at large. It is rare indeed for a respectable American magazine to allow an old alum to fill its pages with nostalgic gripes. But since Harper's let Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. '57 (one of the magazine's contributing editors) write such a piece for them, and since they made it the cover story of their March issue, and gave it the hype-laden title "Harvard on the Way Down," this otherwise unimportant, unenlightening article demands some response...
Take the students, for example. They are divided, Aldrich writes, between "the careerists and the party of fairness." We all know the careerists. The fairists are that group of students who favor lotteries as a means of admitting students to freshman seminars and oppose master's choice. The force which motivates the party, says Aldrich, is a "passive, dull, and slightly sullen drive to do away with 'distinctiveness.'" In case you are still wondering just who Aldrich is referring to, he tells you how to spot them: "The most obvious emblem of the party is a uniform seen practically everywhere...
...course, this is nonsense, pop sociology at its most superficial. There simply is no "party" of fairness at Harvard. There are individuals who believe in what Aldrich terms "fairness," but they neither act like nor identify themselves as a party. More importantly, as individuals they are not powerful forces within Harvard. The status of the College's elite, "unfair" concentration, like Social Studies and History and Literature, remains largely unchallenged. One of the most vocal student movements during the past year was the Radcliffe residents' drive to keep a higher percentage of women in their Houses than there...
...Aldrich's misunderstanding of the social and political climate at Harvard serves his ends. He wants us to imagine that sullen cadres are manning the ramparts in defense of fairness, for it supports his belief in the broader, more nefarious movement that threatens to turn Harvard into just another indistinguishable subdivision of the real world, a collegiate Levittown. To regain the "character" it has already lost, he believes the University will have to dedicate itself to "intuition over fairness, to judgment over test scores, and it must discriminate before it facilitates...
...advocate no specific policies unless one is willing to provide an ideology to direct the intuition. A radical's intuitive approach to Harvard admissions might prescribe a drastic cut in the number of preppies admitted to make more spaces available to minority students; the intuition of some of Aldrich's fellow alumni might lead to the selection of sons of men just like themselves--cultured, upper-crust, white. Aldrich neglects to name the brand of intuition he favors, but his rhetoric reveals his predilections. Discussing student opposition to master's choice, he writes, "The merest suspicion of discriminate assembly...