They might offend the poor...
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As you all know, I constantly scour the world in search of the objectionable and asinine. Well, Harvard has come through for me with flying colors today.
Apparantly, the editorial staff of the Harvard newspaper is objecting one student's business venture, which offers to send maids to clean students' dorm rooms. Why is this bad, you ask? Because it serves to accentuate the economic differences of the student body at Harvard.
Really? No...really? I hate to break it to these folks, but a cleaning service is valuable to the student body, and does not accentuate economic differences any more than anything else. What about clothing? There will be people toting Prada and Gucci while the rest brawl at Old Navy. Why not institute a dress code as well?
The problem is that whoever wrote this article treats dorm rooms as some last bastion of complete equality in college, something which is simply not true. As long as cleaning dorm rooms should be eliminated for fear of pointing out inequality, students should not be allowed to furnish their individual dorm rooms either. What if one of the more well-off students brings a better computer, or television, or video game system? Well, it would make the others feel bad. We can't have that. After all, they don't know that they have less money than other people, and the shock of this revelation might kill them.
The article also sites a potential philosophical conflict: What if one roomate can afford the service and the other cannot? Do you get half the room cleaned? Do you not get the room cleaned at all?
This is not a question of socio-economic difference, this is a question of what kind of person you are. If you can afford to have a room cleaned, why would you demand your roomate pay for half if you know that he/she cannot afford it? Unless you truly dislike the other individual, why would you only pay for your half of the room to be cleaned?
I can see how maybe a less privileged individual might feel bad having their roomates pay fully for a service that both parties benefit from, but again, unless the relationship is strained to begin with, would this really cause such a problem? I see that there may be issues with one individual thinking that another is "rubbing their wealth" in their face, but this is something that has to be dealt with at an individual level, not something that should be institutionalized. Business ventures are not the cause of this unrest, personal relationships and individual personalities are.
I also find it interesting that the article that rails against polarizing is the one that polarizes, bringing terms like "haves and have-nots" and "rich and poor" into a discussion that I'm almost certain had not even considered these things. I'm sure that Dormaid only started with the intent to clean dorm rooms, and as professionally offered service, required a fee to do so.