Enough, Already

I hate junk mail.

I am addicted to my e-mail, but it’s nothing short of exasperating when my little off-ramp on the information superhighway gets clogged with e-flotsam and e-jetsam.

This is why I’m upset with President Lawrence H. Summers for his ill-planned (and atrociously misinterpreted) remarks about women in science and engineering; the result for me has been a torrent of e-mails on open lists about the subject, all saying the same thing, none worth my reading.

Thanks, Larry.

One e-mail in particular struck me as notably outrageous, and not just because I received it four times. The Coalition for an Anti-Sexist Harvard yesterday held a rally in front of the Science Center to SPEAK OUT FOR AN ANTI-SEXIST HARVARD and COMMUNITY VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE [their caps, not mine]. I confess, the almost-certainly-well-meaning Coalition lost me with the subject line—I don’t much appreciate being e-shouted at. What followed, moreover, was a ridiculous laundry list of demands that demonstrated an ill-conceived (and unfair) attempt to roll a host of campus issues into the firestorm around President Summers’ leadership.

A women’s center, childcare for Harvard workers, more tenured female and minority faculty, and the creation of a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department: independently, these are all worthy objectives, and there is nothing wrong with a student group demanding them of the University. The link to Larry Summers’ remarks, however, is tenuous at best. When the Coalition tied into their list of demands the threat of a “community vote of no confidence” in Summers’ leadership, it implied that the president is directly and individually responsible for these demands’ not already being met. I don’t know if he is or if he isn’t, but I do know that Summers’ recent remarks to a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) can only be held against him for their being tactless, and that they gave no indication that Summers is a sexist. To link the worthy causes for which the Coalition advocates into a smear campaign against Summers is misguided at best.

In spite of my objections, I can see why the Coalition has timed raising its concerns to capitalize on Summers’ NBER gaffe. It’s terribly unfair to Harvard’s beleaguered president, but it makes some sense. Their final two demands, however, condemned the e-mail to my computer’s trash bin: “demanding that Harvard take steps to dismantle the final club system,” and, “the democratization of administrative decision-making.”

The Coalition’s apparent dislike of the final club system has absolutely no place in a rally about President Summers’ leadership. The final clubs have nothing to do with the University’s administration, and to leverage condemnation of President Summers as sexist and unfit for leadership on his abolition of the final club system is unfair, unreasonable, and irrational.

As for the democratization of administrative decision-making, the Coalition has to realize that Harvard is not a democracy and never should be. As students, we pay tuition, not taxes, and while we ought to be able to expect a certain level of attention to our needs as members of the college community, we should not expect a hand in the decision-making of the college itself.

President Summers has gone through, and will continue to go through, more than enough for remarks that really weren’t all that offensive in the first place; for goodness’ sake, leave my inbox alone.

Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.