Harvard needs poor students: “The poverty of scholars is of inestimable worth in this money-getting nation. It maintains the true standards of virtue and honor…The poor scholars and preachers of duty defend the modern community against its own material prosperity.”

But Harvard also needs rich students: “…this College owes much of its distinctive character to those who bringing hither from refined homes good breeding, gentle tastes, and a manly delicacy, add to them openness and activity of mind, intellectual interests, and a sense of public duty…To lose altogether the presence of those who in early life have enjoyed the domestic and social advantages of wealth would be as great a blow to the College as to lose the sons of the poor. The interests of the College and the country are identical in this regard. The country suffers when the rich are ignorant and unrefined. Inherited wealth is an unmitigated curse when divorced from culture. Harvard College is sometimes reproached for being aristocratic. If by aristocracy be meant a stupid and pretentious caste, founded on wealth, and birth, and an affectation of European manners, no charge could be more preposterous: the College is intensely American in affection, and intensely democratic in temper. But there is an aristocracy to which the sons of Harvard have belonged, and let us hope will ever aspire to belong,–the aristocracy which excels in manly sports, carries off the honors and prizes of the learned professions, and bears itself with distinction in all fields of intellectual labor and combat; the aristocracy which in peace stands firmest for the public honor and renown, and in war rides first into the murderous thickets.”

WHAT SAY YE?

The use of the word “queer” as a term of pride, however, is something that has always irked me about the gay-rights movement. Alright: there needs to be some term which casts an umbrella over gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and all variants in between. But “queer”? Self-proclaimed queer activists call it a process of “reclamation” in which a word of scorn and abuse is converted into a word of honor. The problem, however, is that “queer” had a meaning well before it had anything to do with gays. It meant—and means—“strange.” You can have a queer-looking building or a queerly-acting pet. Its use includes and transcends a purely sexual definition; it only began to apply to gays in order to offensively denote their strangeness. The gay movement can’t strip it of that definition simply by fiat—pace postmodernism, words still have some shards of meaning left in them. So the principal definition of “queer” remains “that which is strange.”

Why, though, would you want to recall and promote being strange? For a field which is so obsessively preoccupied with the injustice of Othering, this kind of self-marginalization is self-destructive. I am an integrationist in the broadest sense of the word—rather than separatist identity caucuses of gays proclaiming themselves “queer” vis-a-vis mainstream society, we need a mainstream society which accepts and includes gays. In other words, we need a society where gays are not queer.

Of course, BGLTSA has the right to call themselves whatever they want. They could call themselves the Awesome Dudes’ Club or the Society of Narwhal Preservationists or whatever else they’d like and they don’t have to run it by me. Ultimately I lean libertarian on this issue. Still, I think the name change is diagnostic of a kind of left politics which I believe to be cryptoconservative, a kind which does little to expand and invigorate the franchise of modern society.

-Francis Wayland
Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States. 1842.

-Francis Wayland
Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States. 1842.

www.funding.fas.harvard.edu

Thomas Sheridan (1687-1753), Ars Punica, 1719.

-C.P. Cavafy (trans. from the Greek by R. Dalven)

Hello, Legion. I’ve returned.

That is all.

He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part, in his own ink.

John Ray (1627 – 1705), naturalist

As cited in: Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), pp. 11.