Students and faculty at Harvard University are lamenting the fact that their newest university president is white.
Announced last week, Lawrence S. Bacow, an MIT and Harvard-trained attorney, author, and economist, will serve as Harvard’s 29th president. Despite his many qualifications, he doesn’t check the diversity box. Bacow will be Harvard’s 28th white male president.
Certain undergraduates attending Harvard are truly convinced that without a person of color serving as their university president, the university will lose its prominent status. They’ve made the aberrant decision of placing melanin as their arbiter of success.
“A thought that I had earlier was that, in a few years, if the diversity of the incoming class keeps increasing, [a] white president will no longer be representative of the Harvard student body, which is a big issue,” Harvard student Diego Navarrete told the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
Another student, Sebastian A. Reyes, blatantly laments seeing Bacow become president — not because he feels Bacow’s academic background isn’t on par with that of an Ivy League president, but because Bacow is not a racial minority.
“I think the one sort of thing I had in mind for the new president was that it would be a person of color, so it was really disheartening that that occurred,” Reyes told the Crimson. “I think it puts Harvard behind a lot of other universities which have already selected people of color as their presidents.”
Nicholas P. Whittaker, a student who chairs the Multicultural Center Coalition, agrees.
“It would’ve been really encouraging for the University to choose someone who had a proven track record of consistently showing up for marginalized communities, not in just in words but in actions,” Whittaker told the Crimson.
A recent op-ed published in the Crimson, titled “66-Year-Old Married White Male With a Doctorate,” makes the claim that “the announcement of Bacow comes from the fear that people of color hold minuscule say in how our university is run.”
“He must listen when students explain that race and gender alter the kind of Harvard experience they have,” student Ruben Reyes Jr. asserts in his editorial. “And, more than that, he must prepare Harvard and its students for a future that is increasingly dependent on the expertise of women and people of color.”
Harvard doctoral student Nadirah Farah Foley took to Twitter to convey her displeasure with Bacow’s new position.
I really can’t stop laughing at the fact that this isn’t even Harvard’s first president who’s a white male economist named Larry. lolsob.
— nadirah (@polumechanos) February 11, 2018
Bacow served as president of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., from 2001 to 2011. He also spent 24 years serving as chancellor and department chair at MIT. He carries three degrees from Harvard: a J.D., M.P.P., and a Ph.D. in Public Policy.
Born in Detroit, Bacow is the son of two Eastern European refugees; his mother escaped Nazi persecution and his father escaped the pogrom massacres. Ironically, the son of two Jewish immigrants who came to the United States to escape persecution for their ethnicity doesn’t meet the barometer for diversity in modern-day higher education.
Despite his race and gender, Bacow is scheduled to succeed Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s first woman president, this summer.
Isaiah Denby is a college freshman from Tampa Bay, Fla., studying economics and political science.
