Magazine's Rankings Matter

To the editors:

Re "Rankings Irrelevant" (Dissent, Dec. 16): Nobody is asking Noah Oppenheim to "kowtow to the notion that minorities can only feel comfortable in each other's company." However, he should acknowledge that many people do feel uncomfortable when surrounded by others who do not look like they do. Clearly, neither I nor Oppenheim can ever understand how it feels to be black in a white majority. But let's turn the tables: If Oppenheim were a student at Howard instead of Harvard, how comfortable would he feel?

I agree "the demise of self-segregation should be lauded, not lamented." But there is something to be said about seeing faces on campus that are the same color as mine. Although only one of my closest friends is Asian American, I took comfort in seeing many Asian faces every day at Harvard. Now that I am at a law school where the Asian American population is significantly smaller, I feel less comfortable, even though I have never enveloped myself in an Asian American community.

Moreover, Oppenheim suggests that because "there was a direct relationship between a school's percentage of black students and its social rating," Harvard should discount Black Enterprise's rankings altogether. Why, then, was Stanford, which has a 5 percent black population, ranked tenth in the same Black Enterprise survey? Evidently it's not because Stanford has more black students than Harvard, whose black population is 6 percent.

Somehow, Harvard isn't doing something right. Finding out and fixing what isn't right is immensely important not only for black students, but for the entire Harvard community. The first step in the "demise of self-segregation" for which Oppenheim yearns is the discovery and resolution of the very problem he feels is "not worth our notice." Black Enterprise's rankings are very relevant. SHARON C. YANG '98   Washington, D.C., Dec. 16, 1998

The writer was associate magazine editor of The Crimson in 1997.