Harvard Diversifies Portrait Collection because it's Too White and Male

Harvard is taking diversity to a whole new dimension. That is, 2D. If you are a white, male portrait, you better do some Harry Potter style frame shifting and make room for more minority and female faces. The Boston Globe reported that Harvard has been engaged in a project to diversify the subjects of the many oil portraits that hang in libraries and other areas of campus. A 2002 inventory found that 690 of the 750 such portraits were of white men. Only two were of minority individuals, and the rest were white women--generally the wives of presidents, members of benefactors' families, or Radcliffe College professors. Everyone will be relieved to hear that in recent years 10 new portraits of minority individuals linked to Harvard have been added to the collection. The latest was unveiled on Friday. It is of Chester Pierce, a 1948 Harvard grad who for many years was a professor of psychiatry and education. He also may have been the first black college student to play a football game at an all-white Southern university, the University of Virginia. Check out the Globe's slide show to formulate your own opinion on some of the Harvard portrait collection's recent additions. Or go Facebook stalk. Or do my homework. Or make my bangs grow out faster.

-The Blogstress