What has been the relationship between Harvard and democratic practices?

What do you think President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's understanding of democracy was in 1913?

Has discrimination that is achieved through racism and gender- and class-based oppression been left far in the past--as President Lawrence Summers seems to suggest--at Harvard, in Cambridge, in Boston, in Massachusetts, in the United States?

How do you think the politics of merit played out at Harvard in the nineteenth century?  How do you think they play out today?