Lurita Doan has a thing or two to tell Harvard, and she does it very well in her Los Angeles Times OpEd, “On Race, Harvard Still Must Learn.”
Her father, Lucien Alexis Jr. (Harvard, 1942). Was the only black member of Harvard’s lacrosse team. When he and fellow team members arrived in Annapolis for a match with the Naval Academy in 1941, the Academy demanded that he be removed from the field, “declaring that no midshipman would take the field with a colored man.”
Tempers boiled, and the Harvard lacrosse team prepared to forfeit the game. William J. Bingham, the university’s athletic director, intervened, ordering Harvard’s coach to send my father back to Cambridge. Harvard played the scheduled match.
This episode of discrimination provoked a controversy at the time, with scalding editorials, calls for investigation by the Senate, and much criticism of Harvard in the Harvard Crimson. As Ms. Doan writes,
Almost 70 years later, it’s clear that the Harvard-Navy lacrosse game of 1941 offered a near-perfect teachable moment for the cause of equality (a cause Harvard claimed to espouse) had the school so chosen. Early on, Harvard could have shattered the grip of racial hatred by standing firm. But Harvard didn’t seize the moment. Instead, it chose the easy path.
Now, in an argument that those on the left will find counter-intuitive or even odd, Ms. Doan sees history repeating itself in the Gates affair.
Harvard’s leaders, in 1941, were not ready to see the future. Nor are they today. From his statements in the days after his arrest, Gates seems locked in the past regarding race. His first reaction was to demand preferential treatment, see himself as a victim and see his arrest as “the way a black man is treated in America.” The message he has sent is that what happened to him was purely about race, when we’re far beyond that.
If he looked around, he would discover that black men and women can and do compete equally at Harvard, and need no special protection, class or distinction. They achieve using intellect, hard work and perseverance. The world Gates inhabits, which prefers victimization and demands special treatment, is as wrong today as Harvard’s Jim Crowism was in 1941.
Obama’s “teachable moment” could have done the nation a great service by denouncing race-based distinctions of any sort. After all, he wasn’t elected because he’s black, but because Americans thought he had the wisdom, temperament and ability to serve as president. Yet neither the president nor the professor has seized the moment to take bolder steps in a discourse on race.
Instead, we have a black president who insists that the state continue bestowing preferential treatment on people because they look like him.
This is a very perceptive analysis. It’s accurate because (and I say this as a Harvard alumnus) Harvard is fundamentally conservative — it never takes chances, and adopts ideas only when they have already been tested and accepted. It has no innovators, what it has are people who *were* innovators 20-40 years ago and are now part of the change-resisting establishment (which Gates is 100%). They go to their graves reliving past glory and resisting the next generation. Harvard *will* hire the innovators of today who are exposing Gates’ backwardness — but they won’t hire them for another 30 years, when they in turn have become the establishment.
Ms. Doan doesn’t think Obama was elected because he’s black? Well, I do. Whites feel a rich glow of self-righteousness when they vote for a black man because, you see, it shows they are free from the dreaded taint of racism.
Alum – I think you are correct about Harvard’s conservatism. It really is all about the brand. I am fascinated about the recent case of Chanequa Campbell, a student from Brooklyn somehow associated with non-Harvard students who allegedly committed a murder in a Harvard dorm. Rumors of drug dealing abound. Campbell has been charged with no crime (and indeed, her only fault may have been to associated with the alleged perpetrators), but yet her diploma was withheld. OK, maybe Harvard knows something we don’t, but the act of withholding a diploma reflects a desire to protect the brand as deep as any Fortune 100 corporation.