THE HARVARD CRIMSON | February 25, 2020
Page 6
Editorial The Crimson Editorial board
Op-Ed
Datamatch Got Us Two Free Meals, Harvard Should Get Us One
In the 24 Minutes Home
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erhaps there really is no such thing as a free lunch. After running out of funding for the rest of the year, Classroom to Table — a popular program that subsidizes meals for College undergraduates and their professors in Harvard Square — is now “on hiatus” for the remainder of the spring semester. The program, which started in 2015, has been suspended mid-semester each term between spring 2018 and spring 2019, and its future direction is now under review. Since its inception, we have been extremely supportive of Classroom to Table for providing a non-academic setting in which students and faculty can get to know each other on a more intimate level. Though exchanges during class and office hours are no doubt productive and meaningful, they are often restricted to dissecting readings or planning upcoming assignments. In contrast, dinner conversations are more comfortable and friendly, enabling students to form personal relationships with professors who they may otherwise only see in the half-light of the academic’s reading lamp. The persistent shortage of funds demonstrates that students and in turn
the faculty they invite recognize the value and joy of these meals. As such, in putting the program on hold — and stronger still under review — the College sends a sort of mixed message about the relationships and forms of engagement they want to promote and their ultimate willingness to make them financially possible.
Our conclusion, if simplistic, is that Harvard should, for lack of a better phrase, pony up. Our conclusion, if simplistic, is that Harvard should, for lack of a better phrase, pony up. Still more, a sustainable solution to this constant funding problem would seem to also involve creating other forums to fill what is obviously a void in personal engagement between faculty and students. One idea would be to increase the number of faculty dinners in Annenberg and the Houses, which would seem to be more cost-efficient as well as inclusive. But we’d also like to make an appeal to faculty members themselves. Of course, we understand that as
leaders in their fields — not to mention family members, friends, and private persons — Harvard faculty balance busy schedules. And we want to acknowledge the incredible dedication so many faculty members show to their students. But it’s worth remembering that, as teachers, faculty have a critical responsibility — and we’d hope, given the caliber, not to mention charm, of students here, desire — to get to know their students as people. It’s the sort of practice that seems to be done best at small liberal arts colleges, but that need not prevent the same from happening here. The fight for programs like Classroom to Table should not be taken up by students alone. A faculty-student meal should be a pleasure and privilege on both sides of the table. This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
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The Crimson @thecrimson Complicating the Virtues of Political Correctness Eric Yang Plain Truth
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erate actions of evil groups (the billionaires, the WASPs, the privileged) and institutions (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and now The Crimson). Individualized examples of actual wrongdoing only typify this mentality. Jeffrey E. Epstein and Harvey Weinstein are not viewed as flawed individuals but as manifestations of latent, structural injustice. Crucially, this sense of justice is not limited to political correctness. If anything, other examples of societies motivated primarily by a sense of justice — such as the one which animated multiple generations of Christian crusades — provide a worrisome model of how an overemphasis on justice promotes a virtue of zealotry. If the world is divided into “us” and “them’’, virtue is calling out and challenging the injustices perpetrated by “them”, especially where injustice is least obvious. The overall culture, however, especially among the apathetic, is one of reluctance or even fearful compliance to an ever-expanding set of norms of what is politically correct. Thus a culture of political correctness rooted only in justice, that attempts to address fundamental societal issues of inequality, will fail on its own terms. The more that one describes a looming threat and berates others for their insensitivity and lack of acknowledgment, the more one alienates potential allies to combat this very threat of an all-consuming, immoral “them”. The more persuasive grounding for a culture of political correctness is one which recognizes a dignity in each individual. This dignity is not dependent on the status of the individual as a moral agent who identifies and combats evil, but stems from a mutual recognition of human weakness. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a victim of some of the greatest acts of institutional oppression perpetrated against an entire people, still wrote after his experiences that “the line divid-
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he Hong Kong International Airport is a good half an hour away from the center of Hong Kong Island, even on the airport express, the direct train between the busy city and the busy airport. Whenever I come back from the States, after a semester of school and after a 15-hour flight back, I board that airport express, headed towards home. During the ride, I look out the window and glimpse the familiar scenes. There is the Tsing Ma Bridge with its suspending cables that twinkle at night, the cargo docks that operate even at the early hours when my flight lands, and right before the terminal stop, the station which a few of my friends live right above.
Whenever I come back from the States, after a semester of school and after a 15-hour flight back, I board that airport express, headed towards home. When the train passes, I send a text to say “hi.” It feels like I am back in my whole past world, a dazzling place that I have always known, as if the entire horizon is painted in a nostalgic mix of sepia tones. In fact, every time I come home, I do the things that I have always enjoyed doing: visit the restaurants that my mum and I love, play football (soccer) with my interclass team, hang out with friends in Causeway Bay, and stay up at sleepovers, squeezing every minute of the night into Alex Hunter’s FIFA career. At some moments, when I happen to forget about choosing classes on my.harvard.edu, logging on my college email, and checking the buzzing notifications from my friends in the United States, I almost feel like I have never left. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy my classes (not so much checking emails) and really appreciate the friends that I have gotten to know and rely on at Harvard. I do feel like I belong at this place. Maybe you think that I am still lonely on the inside and simply do not dare to admit it. But I know what it feels like to be at home, and I feel that way when I am at Harvard with my friends and in Hong Kong with my friends and family.
But I know what it feels like to be at home, and I feel that way when I am at Harvard with my friends and in Hong Kong with my friends and family.
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hat is political correctness? To some it is a key reason why the Democrats lost their way and the 2016 election. Others argue that it is a right-wing fiction, a means to rile up the base against an imaginary enemy. Political correctness hasn’t featured prominently in discussions thus far, but as the Democratic primary progresses, it is fairly likely that it will make a reappearance in pundit discussions of 2020, especially if the Democrats lose again. Within Harvard at least, political correctness is more than a phantasmic foe. It is how, despite the diverse backgrounds and ambitions of the greater Harvard community, most come to abide by a consensus view about what is acceptable, especially in public conversation. In fact, taking Harvard as its own miniature society with a distinct culture, political correctness is a testament to Edmund Burke’s arguments about the positive power of prejudice, whereby our unconscious and instantaneous acts are really a reflection of accumulated societal wisdom and virtue. The ability to immediately recognize politically “incorrect” phrases and react to them, even with humor, presupposes the existence of common norms and beliefs about what is correct. Yet our miniature society is not completely separate from the outside world. I believe that political correctness has become a needlessly charged topic in society outside of the Harvard bubble partially because of the values that belie the state of political correctness within it. We promote a divisive emphasis on retributive justice and neglect the value of dignity rooted in common humanity. Within the framework of retributive justice, individuals see themselves as moral agents obligated to restore or create a moral equilibrium. This justice encourages a Manichean conception of moral action: corruption of the moral equilibrium is attributed to the delib-
By JUSTIN Y. C. WONG
ing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” This conception of humanity is not a coping mechanism nor an idealistic fantasy, but a necessity for change. “The really terrible thing,” writes James Baldwin to his nephew, is that “you must accept them and accept them with love. For these ‘innocent’ people have no other hope.” One might argue that this degree of love expects too much out of victims or detracts from the original impetus of justice, but I disagree. Solzhenitsyn and Baldwin were writing even as they lived under institutions of oppression, and still were capable of critiquing these dehumanizing, oppressive institutions while acknowledging the humanity of their oppressors. The recognition of the dignity of others is the best display of one’s own. This moral standard set by Solzhenitsyn and Baldwin is high, but that is where Burke’s prejudice works to make up for our deficiencies. The mechanics of prejudice work to transform an ideal of virtue into a reality of action as we are both agents and objects of change. A politically correct society can still strive towards retributive justice, but this justice ought to be dependent on and tempered by a conception of individual dignity. If virtue within this society is acknowledging the dignity of others, then culture is one of constant mutual encouragement and self-examination, because no one’s virtue is guaranteed. To the reader eminently concerned with social justice, I thank you for reading this far. I also challenge you to take Baldwin and recognize the flawed individual humanity of not just those most downtrodden and oppressed by society, but also of its most powerful and privileged members. —Eric Yang ’22, is a History concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.
So what is this strange feeling that I cannot seem to shake off? On the first few nights back home, I always get jet-lagged at 3 or 4 a.m. As my phone lights up with messages from my U.S. friends, the city is softly asleep. I can stare out the window and see yellow street lights on empty roads, dark figures of highrises cast against the sky, and the occasional apartment light that stays on throughout the night. At that time, I feel the rift between two parts of my life, the two places that I call home. Like a secret agent, I live my double lives, with only so many insiders who are in on my secrets and can understand both worlds. They say you get a chance to start anew at college, that no one knows who you were, so you get to press the reset button and reinvent yourself. Even the first prompt from the First-Year Experience Office’s Journal Project asked, “What parts of your pre-Harvard self do you choose to leave behind?” But why should I leave a part of myself behind? How can I distance myself from the past that has brought me to where I am, from the friends and family who have witnessed my baby
How can I distance myself from the past that has brought me to where I am, from the friends and family who have witnessed my baby steps and giant strides, and most of all, from my own self? steps and giant strides, and most of all, from my own self? And even if I choose not to leave behind parts of myself, how do I reconcile the new parts with the old? It is no secret that Harvard “transforms” you, from the way you dress to the way you act and talk. But any experience, by definition, changes you. So I guess this feeling of change is just a natural occurrence that I should and will eventually get used to. But even as I grow accustomed to Lyft’s designation of 945 Memorial Drive as “Home” and get closer to changing my Facebook cover photo, taken a few years ago when my friends and I sat by the reservoir after an afternoon of biking, I am still tightly holding onto the people and things I belong with and adapting to the distant parts of my life. —Justin Y. C. Wong ’22, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint Philosophy and Neuroscience concentrator in Dunster House.
