College Should Not Hamper Student Opportunities

To the editors:

With each passing day, this college continues to astound me.

It is unfortunate enough that the administration has adopted an unreasonably hostile position toward final clubs and similar fraternal organizations, based on anachronistic stereotypes and sweeping generalizations and thus hinders the desires of students who wish to maintain a real social life like that outside the idealistic fantasyland that is Harvard.

And it is laughable that the College suggests that students turn to their Houses for social opportunities, after the administration itself undermined the very social threads the held together Houses by instituting a randomization policy that has resulted in faceless, featureless communities and has proven on many fronts to be an unmitigated disaster.

Yet it is infuriating to have read in The Crimson ("Lowell Masters Stress House Ban on Assassin", March 4) that even the limited social offerings of the Houses are now under attack by administrators. For House Masters like Diana L. Eck to threaten Expulsion from the House community as a response to playing the game of "Assassin"--enjoyed by students across the country as harmless, cerebral fun--is preposterous and unjustifiable. Particularly amusing are the objections to the game's "violent" overtones, sentiments I suppose would resonate more soundly were they to come from an administration not currently maintaining relations with two convicted students rapists. My guess is that Eck and her cohorts will not be satisfied until student social options are limited to House book clubs, language tables, and similar, more "scholarly" endeavors that no realistically social person would ever pursue to let off some steam.

This latest development may seem minor, but it is indicative of the antagonistic role that the College has come to take in its students' lives, in subjects ranging from social life to advising to quality of teaching. No, it is not the College's responsibility to provide students with social opportunities, as Dean Harry R. Lewis '68 has pointed out, but in maintaining a paternalistic, stifling framework within which students must choose their social activities, the administration only augments dissatisfaction among its students and ultimately creates an undesirable community of Malcontent individuals. Someday the College may come to understand this, but it certainly shows no signs of enlightenment anytime soon. GEORGE W. HICKS '99-'00