TALK TO US!

The complaint is as old as Harvard: Administrators make decisions about student life without engaging students. And students respond, often rightfully, that the decisions are out-of-touch with reality (e.g. booze) or just crazy (e.g. the Library Building at 90 Mt. Auburn).

I write today with a slightly different complaint about the decision to institute women’s only hours at the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (QRAC). I find fault not with the decision—it was a good one—but with the fact that a small clique of administrators made the decision, once again, with little input from anyone else. In doing so, they deprived the Harvard community of an opportunity to improve itself through the discussion of an issue that will follow us long after we leave Cambridge.

The controversy surrounding women’s only hours, which Fox News and the Associated Press have made national news, stems from its source: Muslim women who requested these hours because they must be fully clothed if men are exercising alongside them. If students need education and real-life experience with any civic issue—the supposed goal of our revitalized curriculum—it is this: the politics of multiculturalism and how America will deal with its changing ethnic and religious makeup.

And yet student discussion was not organized in January when Susan Marine, Director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, Paul J. McLoughlin, Assistant Dean of Harvard College, and Jeremy L. Gibson, Associate Director of Athletics, met to decide how best to deal with these requests. According to Marine and McLoughlin, the absence of dialogue was not an accident.

Both were motivated by the kindest intentions in keeping the decision to themselves: protecting the Muslim students from hurtful comments. Nevertheless, by remaining secretive they not only engendered anger among students who were surprised by the decision, but also missed a perfect educational opportunity to improve community awareness and sensitivity.

It is impossible to know which side wins in a cost-benefit analysis: “Might the Muslim students’ discomfort outweigh the educational benefits?” is an argument with which I sympathize. I am skeptical, however, that discomfort can ever be avoided when dealing with tensions of privileges, exclusion, and religion; these issues are controversial because of their public nature—in how they infringe on the privileges of some in order to benefit others—and the administration’s attempt to sidetrack controversy only created more of it.

In my ideal Harvard, McLoughlin and the rest of University Hall would have organized House-based discussions in which the Muslim women live. Although the logistics would have been more complicated, the benefits of holding such discussions on a House-by-House basis, each of which has its own gym, are numerous.

On a practical level, many of the students who are supposed to gain from the hours live in Mather and Leverett and are unable to use the QRAC at 8 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Very few women have used the gym so far because of the inconvenience, not due to a lack of desire.

More importantly, these House forums would have fostered discussion about this delicate and crucial issue; would have given students a chance to talk face-to-face with their Housemates about their personal concerns; and would have provided students with a forum to argue the merits and demerits of the issue.

Maybe I am placing too much faith in the power of community debate—blame Social Studies 10. The fact remains that multiculturalism and religious rights are vital issues to all Harvard students, and discussion remains the backbone of any education. If House Committees had added this to their agendas and University Hall paid for advertisements and pizzas, students would have come out and talked, which is the only way that acceptance improves.

Even in the worst-case scenario—a student voicing cruel judgments—another student standing up to the jeerer would be an invaluable statement of support, as would the likely conclusion of the meeting: a House Committee’s democratic vote to allow Muslim women to use its gym exclusively each week.

Harvard students can whip off sneering e-mails about women they do not know, but it is much harder to insult people to their face once they have been identified as members of your House and have publicly expressed their personal concerns. It is hard for me to believe that Matherites would have stood up and disparaged a peer who just asked for a few hours of special access to the community’s gym.

I may be naïve to expect community dialogue to improve religious tensions, or even to expect people to care about the dialogue itself. But why not use this little Garden of ours as an experiment? Administrators like to think of Harvard as something different from the real world—a place in which University Hall acts as a special guard that “protects” students.

We should try a different experiment in which students actually have responsibility in making major decisions that concern their daily lives. If this community is ever going to be liberal (liberal in the democratic-acceptance-sense rather than the I-Heart-Barack-Obama-sense), silence on multiculturalism and backdoor decisions will get us nowhere. By experimenting with community forums in which students are able to give up their privileges—rather than have administrators take them away—we would be living up to what Harvard hopes to be. We don’t need Habermas to teach us that.

Andrew D. Fine ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.