c. 1999 Religion News Service

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. _ If Jewish students are overrepresented at Harvard University, they are way overrepresented at the Harvard Crimson.

“It’s been a very Jewish newspaper, disproportionately, since the 1970s,” says Noah Oppenheim, a junior from Tucson, Ariz., who is now one of the paper’s two editorial chairs.

Two incidents in the last two years have in very different ways highlighted the tension that can exist when issues of diversity, tolerance and overrepresentation collide.

Chris King, a sophomore from Winter Park, Fla., is an evangelical Christian, though he resents being put in some Jerry Falwell box that presumes because of his faith he is a political conservative.

But King believes that is what happened to him when he ran, and narrowly lost, a race for president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council in December. King ran his campaign on the unusual _ for campus politics _ and faintly spiritual terrain of “community-building,” “shared vision” and “values-driven leadership.”

“In my private life I was a Christian and that was part of who I was,” says King, who belongs to a Harvard prayer group called Christian Impact. But King says he assembled a very diverse campaign _ people of every race, faith and even no faith _ and did not inject his religion into the race.

But then Megan White, a member of the student government election commission, wrote a fateful e-mail to fellow members of the thriving Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship. In the e-mail, White noted she had to remain neutral in the election, but went on to ask for prayers for King and his running mate, Fentrice Driskell. “Please pray for their protection from Satan’s tactics,” White wrote, adding, “I know that God’s hand is directing them to run.” She signed the e-mail, “In Jesus’ grip, Megan.”

“Evangelicals have a real talent for alienating people,” says Andy Crouch, the Christian Fellowship chaplain, noting that language that would seem perfectly normal to someone in the fellowship, or from a part of the country where evangelicals are in abundance, can sound strange and scary to the uninitiated. In this case, he was certainly right.

White may actually be an Episcopalian from Greenwich, Conn. _ hardly an oddity at Harvard _ and she may have felt she was doing nothing but asking friends to be thinking about other friends, but her talk of Satan probably cost King the election.

The e-mail became the subject of a Harvard Crimson story, and ultimately the Crimson did not endorse King’s ticket, noting that “their ties to religious groups have raised concerns among students.”

Oppenheim says that while his own politics are conservative, “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the Crimson has a secular, fairly left-wing editorial staff that wouldn’t want a Christian fundamentalist student government leader.”

But King felt prejudged and condemned. “This could have never happened in the South. I don’t think it would have happened to a person of any faith,” says King, who was shaken by the experience.

“I was nailed to the cross,” says King. “And most of the editorial staff that was so hard on me, the vast majority were Jewish.”

`I don’t really believe this is a healthy place,” he says of Harvard.

A former executive editor of the Crimson, Molly Hennessy-Fiske _ she is Irish working class on her mother’s side and Mayflower ruling class on her father’s _ says she knows firsthand how little tolerance many Harvard students have for the language of faith. Hennessy-Fiske, who is a Roman Catholic from upstate New York, says that when she told some fellow students last year that she had been “praying about” whether to nominate someone for a position at the Crimson, they all “burst out laughing.”

But, she says, King did not do a good job of explaining his religious ties,and his vague talk of “values” made people think there might be some “hidden agenda.” She thought the Crimson editorial on King was reasonable. And, she says, the meeting to discuss the endorsement was very well attended and the editorial was approved by a broad and diverse cross section of Crimson editors _ not all Jewish.

But the issue of the large Jewish presence at the Crimson was not new.

A year earlier, when Justin Danilewitz, a conservative columnist at the Crimson, applied to be one of the two editorial chairs at the paper, he was asked what he was going to do to “improve diversity” at a paper where eight of 10 columnists, himself included, were Jewish. Danilewitz, offended by the questions, did not get one of the top editorial jobs, though two other candidates, both Jewish, who promised to diversify the op-ed page were selected.

To Danilewitz, his rivals offensively pursued the “superficial diversity” of skin color rather than the “ideological diversity that should be the paper’s real object.”

But Daniel Suleiman, one of those who got the job and Oppenheim’s predecessor as editorial chair, contends it was perfectly reasonable to try to assemble a more diverse opinion page staff for a paper trying to speak to all students on campus, and they accomplished it by expanding the number of columnists. And, says Suleiman, Danilewitz’ insistence that diversity can be divorced from identity is, in this time and place, wrong.

“It’s totally unrealistic to think that people are not influenced by their racial identity, especially in multicultural America. It isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it’s a true thing.”

DEA END TILOVE