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Protected-Class Graduate Students Not Getting Enough Love From Harvard

April 2, 2019

Harvard graduate students who belong to four identity-politics groups are complaining that several college officials haven’t supported them enough.

The administrators have treated the students as “separate but equal,” the students said, using the language of the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld government-enforced racial segregation.

The students are part of Dudley House, an entity that Harvard currently uses to serve graduate students and off-campus undergraduates. The two house masters, a traditional position that Harvard in February 2016 started calling “deans” because “masters” calls to mind slave owners, are a married couple who are planning to leave in June.

But the current administrator of Dudley House plans to stay, and the graduate students want her gone. They also want a diversity center and more money, among a list of 12 demands, according to The Harvard Crimson.

They also want more Dudley House fellows, half of whom would oversee diversity programming.

In addition, they’d like an official review of the past five years of Dudley House events “to see how much programming has been given to represent and highlight the white European cultural experience and popular idiom,” according to The Harvard Crimson.

The four groups who made an initial proposal in December 2018, which they feel has been ignored, are Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering, the W.E.B. DuBois Graduate Society, the Harvard GSAS Latinx Student Association, and the Harvard LGBTQ@GSAS Association.