Lewis left the Black Students Association early. He joined during his first year and served as an officer the following year. No longer an active member, Lewis explains, "I wanted to do other things...There was nowhere else to go in the organization. Maybe that sounds opportunistic."

Opportunistic or not, the up-and-out-quickly pattern exists in other organizations as well. Ahmad served as SAA co-president during his junior year, and Allen as BGLSA co-chair during her first and second years at Harvard.

Experience drains away as a result of an internal contradiction. Students join minority clubs because of a spark of self-searching, but the inherent evanescence of that spark hurts the organizations that fight political battles.

There is a second contradiction. This form of politics exists to help students find and protect their identities, but to win political battles organizations require a collective consciousness antithetical to the individualistic goals of the war.

Rachel A. Bovell '93, who is Black, does not belong to the BSA. "I don't want to get caught up in a group mentality," Bovell says.

She tends toward moderation, eschews confrontation. Bovell disapproves of Jacinda Townsend '91-'92, who responded to Kerrigan's flag by hanging a swastika in a window as a share-the-discomfort gesture. "The very attention that Jacinda paid [Kerrigan] made the controversy worse," Bovell declares.

Those who share her views create a problem for minority student groups. If moderates opt out, their ideas never shape organization policy, and that policy becomes more extreme and less palatable to the rest of the community. A BSA full of Rachel Bovells, for example, might not have invited Leonard Jeffries to Harvard.

Finally, minority organizations may risk losing the support of non-minority students if they retreat too far into themselves. Should the BSA be a social organization for Blacks, or an organization that spreads interest in issues of concern to Blacks? Lewis says, "If I'm in it, it's for the other people in the organization rather than for the greater cause."

And Allen concedes, "I think that one of the risks that identity politics runs is that other people who don't share our identity aren't welcome."

SO THE STUDENT GROUPS have their flaws. But the link between identity politics and the non-activist observer can break down elsewhere.

Campus publications as a group seem to be doing their job competently. Castelein, like Geary, has detected the growth of identity politics through the Harvard media. "Just look at the front page of The Crimson," he says.

And indeed, on last March 8, page one of this newspaper included two stories on the Coalition for Diversity and one each about ethnic studies, a Medical School forum on homosexuality, anti-Semitic graffiti in Lowell House and the date rape debate.

Other publications--The Salient, The Independent, Perspective, Peninsula--cover identity issues as well. It is hard to believe that students who are not identity-politics activists have no means of ascertaining the contending views in any given debate.

How is it, then, that identity politics has left so many students personally unaffected, perhaps even those who perceive and profess some sympathy for its concerns? If identity politics is good enough for everyone that Harvard should embrace its goals, why do some consider it irrelevant? Insufficiencies in minority student groups forms only a part of the explanation; the rest lies with the rank and file.

One possibility is that the Harvard populace has grown more conservative, and campus conservatives have historically showed more antipathy toward identity politics than have liberals.