You can add the Cambridge City Council to those attempting to right the “grievous wrong” of the Harvard staffer who asked a neighbor with a biracial child to keep the noise down … and that if she lived in “affordable housing.”
Theresa Lund, executive director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, was placed on leave following the verbal scuffle in which she complained to a neighbor about her noise level. Lund ended up asking the woman if she lived in “one of the affordable units” or in a Harvard unit.
That neighbor, Alyson Laliberte, posted a video of the encounter on Facebook.
In response, employees of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative will have to attend “new ‘training and programs’ around implicit and explicit bias,” with discussions to ‘promote diversity and inclusion within [the] workplace.’”
According to The Harvard Crimson, the college’s hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts is jumping into the controversy. Its city council plans to sponsor several “community conversations” dedicated to “‘community values’ [that] will allow residents to discuss ‘interactions that are rooted in privilege, classism, and racism.’”
Cambridge Mayor Marc C. McGovern had posted on Facebook that Lund’s reaction to Laliberte was “an example of classism and racism.”
“Racism and classism is not just something that happens ‘somewhere else’,” he wrote. “The truth is that even here in Cambridge, we have much work to do.”
In an interview, McGovern said he knows the diversity conversations will not fix everything.
“This is not something that we’re going to have four or five conversations and all of a sudden Cambridge is going to be a utopia of a place,” he said. “This takes an incredible amount of time but we’re not going to ignore it.”
[City Councillor Sumbul] Siddiqui said the community conversations are in part meant specifically to reduce the frequency of incidents like the exchange between Lund and Laliberte.
“Our goal is to shift people’s mindsets and to think, ‘This is the impact you have when you make a statement like that and when you ask a question like that,’” she said. “This is something that happens. It’s happened to me, it’s happened to a lot of folks on a daily basis. People who don’t face this regularly don’t know it happens.”
Siddiqui and McGovern have not decided on the number or format of the fall 2018 conversations, both said, but will do so in coming weeks. McGovern said some of his preliminary ideas include town hall meetings, panels, and expert speakers. Siddiqui said her office plans to release more information about the discussions in a few days.
McGovern added he wants to “bring the universities in” on the discussions so that they “could help Harvard grapple with the question of how to educate its employees.”
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MORE: Harvard center mandates ‘implicit bias’ training after argument
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