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The story is certainly strange. Chanequa Campbell is a 21-year-old African-American from a tough New York background. She has just been chucked out of Harvard University, 10 days before she was due to graduate.
Chanequa has been linked with the fatal shooting of Justin Cosby on the Harvard campus. Chanequa's friend, another Harvard student, was the long-term girlfriend of the gunman. Jordan Copney, a 20-year-old from New York, shot Cosby and took $1,000. He then handed himself in. Cosby, the victim, was a known drug dealer.
Chanequa denies any knowledge or involvement in the murder. She thinks she is being victimised because she is black. It's a classic case of a benign, liberal education establishment coming up against the stark reality of urban gangster-rap culture.
In the old days, of course, Chanequa would never have got anywhere near Harvard. The university has done a great job in reaching out to students from non-traditional backgrounds. Armed with a $20 billion endowment — at least before the credit crunch — Harvard has been very generous to underprivileged students. Things have certainly changed.
Before the Second World War, Harvard represented white, Anglican (or Episcopalian, as Americans call the Church of England) and Anglophile culture. The student body looked like extras from The Great Gatsby. The men wore cricket sweaters, blazers and straw hats. Jews were frowned upon. Blacks (there were few) were patronised and barred from social clubs. Harvard was exclusive, socially and educationally. It didn't care.
One man I knew who went to Harvard in 1960 remembers seeing well-dressed women of a certain age coming out of the Boston Symphony building. “Is that the cream of Boston society?” he asked. “Try Jerusalem, buddy,” said his Harvard friend.
The most exclusive undergraduate club of all was the Porcellian Club, still known ironically as the “PC”. It was founded in 1791 by people who enjoyed getting together to eat roast pig. Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and founder of the most powerful American political dynasty, was famously excluded from the club: he was Irish. They used to say if a member hadn't made a million dollars by the time he was 40, other members would make up the difference, so to speak.
The Porcellian is still going strong. Unlike its Yale equivalent, the Skull and Bones, it refuses to accept women members, although African-Americans have been admitted since 1983. The university itself has changed completely. I spent a year there about 10 years ago. Then the talk was of “randomising” the houses. All students lived in Harvard Yard in their first year and could then choose which house they lived in for their remaining three years. This choice often led to self-imposed segregation.
Chinese, black and Latino students tended to opt for the same houses, based in what was called the “Quad”, far from the main campus. One house was called Pforzheimer, which showed the influence of new, Jewish money. The privately educated old elites congregated in the older houses, which had scenic views of the Charles River and traditional English names, redolent of the 17th-century Puritan tradition. Eliot, Leverett, Lowell and Winthrop were the names of the elite houses, as I remember.
Since the war, the university has been determined to shed its old elitist image. Money has been lavished on “diversity” programmes. Chanequa herself won scholarships, including a Coca-Cola award, to study at Harvard. She was a proof of how far the university had come in terms of diversity and equality. What Harvard didn't reckon on was the blast of gunfire in one of its student houses. Even diversity has its limits.
