Class Conflict a la Harvard

THE HISTORY of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle, or so Marx said, and Harvard is not immune to these titanic forces. Usually hidden, but at times painfully exposed, the struggle between the two great factions, the upper class and the freshman class, is part of Harvard life. Separation of the classes and the resulting misunderstanding only make the struggle worse.

For years the people in charge here have wavered between the two stratagems of integrating the freshmen into the University around them, or giving them a separate but equal existence. The new mood in University Hall clearly favors the second choice. Freshmen now enjoy (or don't enjoy) their own seminars, their own living area, their own dining hall, their own parties, their own intramurals, their own squads in inter-collegate sports--including their own crew shells--and their own literary magazine. Ever since Henry C. Moses, dean of freshmen, led his chosen people out of the wasteland of the Quad to the chosen Yard, these traditional but mostly fluid divisions have become solid barriers to interaction between the classes. Recent innovations like closing the Union to upperclassmen during lunch, keeping the Union open on weekends(so freshmen can avoid the truma of eating in the big bad Houses), and the now-legendary Fox plan, have turned a de facto separation of Harvard by class into a system not unlike segregation.

Some colleges would laugh this issue right out of the dorm. Many, if not most, house people together regardless of class. Aha, the clever critic notes, most colleges don't employ the House system. Still, Yale, that bastion of Eastern Enlightenment, has what amounts to a four-year, pre-assigned House system, and consequently there is less freshman-upperclass tension (not that they would notice it anyway). Until this year, the Quad, which some of you may have heard of if you've ever hiked a few miles north from the Square, had four-class housing and it was working out just fine.

BUT THAT'S ALL pre-Fox plan. Dean Fox took two facts--that the Quad was less popular than the River Houses, and that there were freshmen at the Quad but not at the River--and concluded that no one wanted to live in a House where freshmen were always getting underfoot. He also called to mind the salubrious effects on freshmen of a "unified freshman experience," and herded his youthful charges into the relative safety of the walled-in Yard. Since the Task Force on Counseling concluded earlier this year that freshmen were better adjusted to college when they lived among upperclassmen than when they were homogeneously separated, the theory that the Fox plan will help freshmen is dubious. The plan also crowded still more bodies into the already overcrowded South Yard dorms, among others, and made the Quad even emptier than it was last year. Veteran Quaddies will tell you that the place just ain't the same without all those little freshmen running around, playing frisbee, unloading station wagons full of furniture, experiencing serious neuroses, wonking for classes before January, and doing all those other cute freshmen things that endear them so in our hearts.

Interclass contact is further reduced by the changes in weekend dining brought on by the bitching of last year's freshmen. Once upon a time freshmen ate at all the Houses in the course of a year. Then they ate at three only, but for longer periods of time at each. Now freshmen don't ever have to leave the comfort of the Union. When they do, they go in convoys with a proctor riding shotgun. To pay for keeping the Union open weekends, all but four Houses have abandoned hot breakfasts. Greatly upset at the prospect of going to 9 a.m. classes without waffles, upperclassmen rose up in unsuccessful protest. Their subsequent resentment was as frequently directed against freshmen as toward Dean Fox.

Not satisfied with frustrating our breakfast, the deans then plotted against our sovereign rights at lunch by closing the Union to Upperclassmen at the noon meal. After all, we could eat at our Houses, and the freshmen needed some peace and quiet at lunch. I for one felt like Ryan O'Neal must have felt when Ali McGraw told him he had no right to use Radcliffe libraries when Harvard owned ten million books. Sure, I could go back to Currier or test the unknown at Adams, but the Union is closer and what's the $7000 for anyway, guys?

THE DECREASING interclass contact is an unhealthy development. First-hand observation of freshmen becomes impossible, so upperclassmen base their views of freshmen on stereotype and rumor. Are freshmen competitive, grade-hungry overachievers, or are they idyllic, innocent waifs who are "testing their wings"? No one can say for sure.

In many ways a freshman is ripe for the picking. Any hawker worth his salt at registration can tell you that a freshman will sign up for or buy anything. For protection the freshman is provided with a surfeit of advisers and information sources. But how does he choose between proctor, senior adviser, academic adviser, Bureau of Study Counsel, Room 13, freshman dean, OCS-OCL, UHS shrinks, roommates and friends? The Confi Guide and Committee on Undergraduate Education guide tell him what to take and where to go. And yet he'll still have to learn by experience that 10 a.m. classes start at 10:10, that all 42 books at the Coop labelled "required" simply aren't, and that paper deadlines are like Defense Department cost figures--overruns are expected. Some proctors can provide helpful advice, but some are biased, others haven't been undergraduates for years, and still others are law school students who know a good financial deal when they see it and are always off somewhere playing with their torts.

The resulting lack of information can sometimes have important results. Last year's freshmen voted to join the CRR without really knowing its particulars or purpose. The paternal outcry of the more worldly and knowing upperclassmen did not deter the freshmen from their chosen path, and the seven-year boycott died a quiet death.

PATERNALISM IS ONE of the milder forms of treatment freshmen can expect from upperclassmen. Shrinivas Rajagopalan, a UHS psychologist who will teach psychology and Social Relations 2400, "The Psychology of Freshmen," in the spring, says that the more violent reactions to freshmen, like scorn, practical jokes and physical cruelty, represent a realization by the upperclassmen that he too was once ignorant and helpless. He says we should keep in mind that "being a freshman for nine months is a stage we all have to go through on the way to adulthood, much like being a fetus before you can be born."

How can we help these poor souls? Certainly not by creating more separate freshman activities. Sources close to UHall say separate museums, libraries and bathrooms for freshmen are in the planning stages. Give these guys a Freshman Week and they'll take a year.

The time has come to bring freshmen back into college life, to show them how the other three-fourths live. We need a freshman Brown vs. Board of Education decision to end their separate but equal status. Hey, any of you freshmen out there want to be a test case?