Economic Diversity?

My grandfather, Albert Adomanis Sr., was a Lithuanian immigrant who worked on the docks of South Philadelphia. He did not finish grade school and never went to high school, much less college. He lived a hard, rough, unforgiving life of manual labor, and died relatively young. Had one found him along the filthy Delaware River, after he finished tying down a freighter, and told him that two of his grandsons would attend Harvard, he would not have known whether to laugh or to cry. While seemingly clichéd, the story of my grandfather has a large bearing on how I ended up here at Harvard.

My family’s story is just another of those seemingly trite American success stories, à la Horatio Alger—a genre with which we are all probably too familiar. Merely because my family’s story is familiar, however, does not make it any less meaningful, or, more importantly, any less true. Why do I bring this up? Is this just another example of that classic competition among Harvard students to see whose path to this school was the most difficult and unlikely? The ever present “race to the bottom” to see whose family was most hard-pressed and disadvantaged? While some will no doubt think it is self-satisfied back-patting, I think it is a point very relevant to discussions over economic diversity here at Harvard.

In an assessment of economic diversity, I would initially seem to be a member of the privileged elite that is undoubtedly so over-represented here. After all, I went to a private school, I reside in a nice suburb just outside a major East Coast city, and I do not receive any financial aid from Harvard. I would imagine, then, that most people would be rather surprised by my family’s rather humble background. I, and many others like me, do not attend Harvard on the largess of a trust fund but rather the ceaseless hard work of my parents. The Adomanis family has no inherited wealth; we earned and paid very significant taxes on everything we gained. My parents will accrue a very substantial debt in order to send me here, and they meet the tuition payments only as a result of careful planning and foresight. In the current discussions over economic diversity, however, my family would be lumped along with families to which forty thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket or a typical deposit into a bank account.

The family experiences that people from backgrounds similar to mine bring to Harvard are valuable and worthy, but are also extremely hard to quantify or nail down. All too often in the office of financial aid, students are defined down to a number, their parents’ combined wages, and a place of residence. This is not to castigate Byerly Hall; it is to note the difficulty of expressing in quantifiable terms as mutable an idea as “economic diversity.” While I admire and support Harvard’s current push to encourage more lower-income students to apply—and certainly hope that the university sees fit to admit fewer of the super-rich—a little recognition from the administration for families such as those I have described would be appreciated.

No one needs to be reminded that there are students here whose personal allowances could easily cover their tuition, but my parents and the parents of many of my friends are not at all comforted (and are frequently agitated) by pronouncements from student, staff, and outsider alike that “everyone at Harvard is rich.” Some of us—many of us—are just middle class, and that too contributes to Harvard’s diversity.



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.