My family played a pivotal role in race issues at Harvard. My father, Lucien Alexis Jr. (Harvard 1942) helped spark the great race awakening at Harvard when he and fellow members of the Harvard lacrosse team arrived for a match at the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1941. The academy insisted that my father, the only black team member, be removed, declaring that no midshipman would take the field with a colored man.
Tempers boiled, and the Harvard lacrosse team prepared to forfeit the game. William J. Bingham, the university's athletic director, intervened, ordering Harvard's coach to send my father back to Cambridge... To save the Harvard lacrosse coach and team members the embarrassment of asking him to leave, my father, quietly, caught the night train back to Cambridge, telling the team it was his idea.
Boston newspapers soon joined in on the side of equality; the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs called for investigations; and another Harvard graduate, President Franklin Roosevelt, was asked to get involved. Yet, even then, Harvard didn't transcend the times... Harvard's leaders, in 1941, were not ready to see the future. Nor are they today. From his statements in the days after his arrest, Gates seems locked in the past regarding race. His first reaction was to demand preferential treatment, see himself as a victim and see his arrest as "the way a black man is treated in America." The message he has sent is that what happened to him was purely about race, when we're far beyond that... The world Gates inhabits, which prefers victimization and demands special treatment, is as wrong today as Harvard's Jim Crowism was in 1941.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-doan2-2009aug02,0,4175835.story-------------------------------------------------------
On April 29, 2008, facing a recommendation by the United States Office of Special Counsel that Doan be "disciplined to the fullest extent" for "the most pernicious of political activity" prohibited by the Hatch Act and an ongoing congressional investigation, Doan submitted her resignation. Doan stated that "It has been a great privilege to serve our nation and a great President."
(i.e. the great village idiot)