The True Story of a Disenchanted But Not Hung-Up Son of Harvard

Last Spring, John Polazzo '69 became a famous Harvard person. He led a gigantic drive to increase parietals. Nothing happened, of course. Most people ended up hating his guts for being so pushy. Since then nothing still has happened. While the HPC has provoked academic change merely by lifting its collective little finger, nobody and nothing has provoked the administration to improve the way people live around here. John Polazzo, who used to live here, tried harder than almost anybody else. He finally quit in January.

BIFF: He's got no character--Charlie wouldn't do this. Not in his own house--spewing vomit from his mind.

HAPPY: Charlie never had to cope with what he's got to.

BIFF: People are worse off than Willy Loman. Believe me, I've seen them.

LINDA: I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character who ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid...Attention must be finally paid to such a person. You called him crazy--

BIFF: I didn't mean--

LINDA: No, a lot of people think he's lost his balance. But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. Arthur Miller,   DEATH OF A SALESMAN

1. Dean Glimp, who knows the trouble, says goodbye

I SPOKE to Dean Glimp the other day and told him not to let kids like me into Harvard or else to find the right institutions for us here. He saw my problem as that of many Negro kids taken out of slums and put here. They know that Harvard thinks a lot of them, bringing them here and all. But then they find that Harvard doesn't treat them very well. It just dumps them and leaves them alone. They tend to doubt how good they are when they run into a bunch of white kids who expect success and know exactly how to get along in this place which they don't. Harvard doesn't give them the continuing support to get by that their acceptance led them to expect.

2. Hello Harvard, sweet land of liberty

SOME STUPID asshole from my school applied to Harvard and I figured that if he was applying I could too and I could do better than he could. I used to read Saturday Review and Reader's Digest and it sounded like The Place, the intellectual community of scholars, the intellectual free place where everybody questions things.

They sorta liked my unusual background and I had very much of an attitude of being very constructive and socially responsible, enthusiastic about learning a lot.

Freshman year I was stuck with two roommates, one very much a physicist from the day he was born and the other one from Fieldstone in New York. He wanted to be a good doctor, his father was a doctor. He was a Jewish kid, very much concerned with getting the grades and getting into medical school. He was a nice guy just caught up too much in trying to be a professional and successful. He made a lot of sacrifices toward that end. Anyway, given these two roommates, it all didn't quite fit the Harvard image.

I expected it, the entry, you know, to be a real jolly place, so I went upstairs one night to an entry party and sat around drinking beer for a couple of hours. I had expected a little more interest in what was going on in the world. Everybody was saying nonsensical things. So I left. So I sorta felt alienated from that group and that cut off my relationship to the entry. Across the hall were a couple of socialite types and I didn't get along with them.

I WAS BORN in a small Catholic town in Italy. A town where everybody knew everybody else, 7000 people. My mother came from a well-to-do land-owning family, large, patriarchal. My grandfather had 24 people in his household at one time. My father's family was more in the businessman's style, small merchants. In Italy, my father had a sort of little business, leasing forests for wood to use for lumber and coal. But then the coal industry got bad 'cause of gas being used. So his business went dead. Instead of starting another business he came to the States, when I was ten. Here he was only qualified to be a working class man, not knowing any English. He had a variety of working class jobs, unhappy with most of them. Then we had a little brother dying. My father had a nervous breakdown. It was a combination of things. He was being embarrassed by those jobs. Back in Italy he had been one of the town's big politicos.

3. Learning about friendship, good old school spirit, and the American way while being friends with the manager

SO DURING freshman year I was isolated and pretty much stuck to my courses and tried to get along with them. As far as social life, I had a girlfriend from Antioch who happened to be in Providence and that took care of that. I spent every weekend in Providence.

I had Hum 5 and tried Math 11. I really wanted to be a mathematician, but the instructor...I just couldn't understand what was going on, he was too disorganized and I couldn't do the work on my own sort of. I couldn't provide any order from his disorganized lectures. I dropped out of that.

There weren't any friends, none. Most of the kids I knew were all NYC Jews. I didn't get to see most of the Harvard men I expected to see.

I was very adaptive at this time. I thought I could get through, make use of Harvard, and get what I wanted. Get the courses, get the intellectual training. I was free to do what I pleased. That is, I felt very free at the time, in the sense of the courses available. Not that I made use of them. It wasn't a matter of being unhappy because of the pressure of the environmental life, but because of the lack of environmental life. It was all very impersonal. That was not too hard to stand because I had been isolated long enough through work and school and so I managed to get through pretty easily or at least normally.

IN MY SECOND high school, I kept up some social life by joining all the activities around. I didn't get high up in any of them cause I didn't do much work--it was just a way to keep myself busy. I worked after school until 5:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 and Friday and Saturday nights I had another job. My real activities were school in the daytime, work in the afternoon and nights on weekends, and family.

The first three years I got a job in a local Chinese restaurant where people knew my family, a place where upper middle class people would go to dinner. After I got sick of being around the neigbhorhood I got a job somewhere else where in the daytime they fed people from the local universities and a local medical center and in the evenings there were professional women; that is, prostitutes were my regular customers.

In the front I got to know the waitresses and in the back I knew the Negroes and Puerto Ricans who were the bus boys and who washed the dishes. I was a bus boy and then a waiter and my role was somewhere between the kitchen and, and...I was young enough so as not to be identified with the white group up front and my status on the job was low enough so I could talk to the people in the back and I was smart enough so I got to be friends with the manager. In effect, I got to observe a microcosm of American society.

I identified with the people I read about in books: people who believed in a liberal education, the Greeks, Socrates, and that stuff. I found something in every author I read. The best education I got was in the arguments with my teachers.

During lunch break, since our classes were made up according to ability, I always hung around with the smart kids, but since the smarter kinds always tended to be middle class, there was only partial identification with the group. We had a common language, but different values. The group I belonged to was more of a debating society than a friendship group.

4. How he prepared in his sophomore year for his father's fortune

SOPHOMORE YEAR it was a little different. I had proved I could make it as far as grades went--I had been group III. I went into a House that was supposed to be a community. There was supposedly more of an interest in people, more of a common cooperative effort. So I expected . . . Since there was supposed to be a community, I was tempted to be part of it; but I didn't find much of a community at all.

I found a House too large and filled with people who didn't know each other and didn't care about knowing each other. So it became . . . it was worse than freshman year. That was just isolation. Sophomore year was isolation psychologically while being in the middle of other people. So there was always a constant reminder that there were all these people around who didn't care about knowing anybody else. So I got pissed off and I kinda stopped working. It made work kinda difficult, that feeling. Also I didn't have that girl back in . . . that girl wasn't very close by, I'd broken up with her. And the way to meet girls I didn't find very . . . I didn't find anything very significant there . . . by the time Spring came along I was really disliking this place.

And then I did find a real nice girl; we were getting along fine but there was a limit to how close I could get to her as a person because of my commitment to the academic life. I felt that it was . . . seeing a girl only on the weekend for entertainment wasn't meaningful enough. I wanted . . . a . . . girl should either be . . . there was the promise of much more intimacy which wasn't possible. I found out that part of being here is just cutting out some personal relationships. It wasn't until I found this really nice girl that I knew this was missing.

And then the parietals business started as a result of this. Given that she could only be around on weekends. I sorta blamed the parietal system for this lack of closeness. Blamed Harvard for structuring the life to make woman and intimacy impossible or at least to discourage it. So I tried to change the system to permit women to be around more often, for a more intimate role, not just of sex.

This got me involved with Harvard as a system. And I got to know most of the guys in the House as a result of that campaign. That was pretty good. So I expected I would be able to come back the next fall knowing the guys and being comfortable enough, socially speaking, to do the academic work.

IT WAS IMPORTANT when my father got a nervous breakdown because then my family was split up. My mother was sick too and since we were a nice family, in most ways, we immediately found foster parents for the six kids. I lived in a lower middle class Italian-American family, very nice people. Three years preceding this I had become sort of a bookworm. So I get to this family and they expected me, since I was eldest, to lead the house and to be energetic. I was 13, just about 14. They expected more independence from me and I sorta developed it. But I still stayed a bookworm and eventually I went to a Catholic high school that was very select.

5. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not occur, but Christmas cards are, in fact, received

I EXPECTED it would be much better in the fall, except it didn't work out that way. When I came back, the people really hadn't changed that much. I did know the people, but the concern wasn't still so much on getting the education or getting the humanistic values or even ever having them; it was just on getting the grades and getting special training, getting into grad school and getting to be a big shot back home in the accepted social group.

And there was still quite a class difference. Harvard is mainly a middle class school. They come here and get their training and be what their parents were. It isn't a community in itself. It does have a variety of individuals, but for most of them it's merely a stopping place, a transient community. So for most people Harvard can provide a very comfortable time if they enjoy meeting other people of different types. It is a sort of entertainment, like going slumming or someth ing.tIi (bffi,t IRV.push or something. It is just a cultural activity, part of the necessary paraphernalia for an "education." For me it was much more because I had left behind my sort of lower class background and had attempted to identify with the broader culture.

Instead I found that in leaving behind the lower class I had come to a place where people were middle class rather than coming to a place where class was irrelevant and the culture was more a general one.

THEY TOOK mostly upper middle class kids at that select Catholic high school and a few lower class kids who were very able. In a class of 33 kids, 28 ended up as Merit Finalists. It was the cream of the crop of the Italian community of Cleveland. I quit that school after a year and a half or rather I was kicked out. I found the education irrelevant. I wanted to go to class and get B's, enough to get by, but outside of class I wanted to be on my own, read books I wanted to. Most of the kids were at school for other reasons, to pick up the skills, the necessary credentials, to enter middle class professional life. The education was not an experience for them, but rather serving time.

I wasn't there for that. Obviously I was lower class. I couldn't depend for my present security on status and money because I didn't have either. Doing work that was oriented toward training for the professional class was very threatening to me personally. I didn't want to train myself outside of class to work in that framework. So I didn't want to do a darn bit for school. But the Jesuits were rather disciplined and they didn't like that stuff.

So I got B's and didn't do any homework. They said I was a demoralizing influence. Christmas vacation I was supposed to memorize some Cicero. I didn't hand it in. The teacher gave me a couple of days. I still didn't do it. So he sent me to the principal. He talked to my teacher and found out I hadn't done the work in most of my courses. I had a couple of teachers who were pretty good. They let me do what I wanted. But that Latin teacher he wanted me to do the work as he told me to. But he I guess has rgeretted it because he's been sending me Christmas cards ever since.

6. Outside the dining hall, Americans are rich and lonely; Italians have lots of lonely friends. They don't know what they're missing

OF COURSE there were many members of the House I found who were more than just middle class. They were brainy, but besides being brainy they had a bit of understanding, I guess. Mostly in the leftist yptes were there politically aware and socially aware people. This was a subculture and I really identified with them and spent a lot of time talking to them.

But there is a difference between what goes on in the dining hall and what most people spend most of their time with. Most of the time is spent on their courses and their academic work which are very competitive individual business. You go to lectures and then you fight for the grade. Apart from this work is the culture developed in the dining hall, where people can be sociable and just enjoy this learning and then there's the private social life of girls on weekends. Sort of three separate often very fragmented aspects of a person's life here. And though I found an interest in academic life, I got to a point where I couldn't stand doing the work in isolation. I would have wanted . . . what was most important to me was this cultural-broadening aspect of the dining hall and I disliked having my situation here evaluated only in terms of ability to do well in classes, making grades, academic work, the important thing.

ITALIANS, EVEN in America, are capable and do exist in real communities where they do have relations with other people as something else than as roles in a large system. Of course, in giving up this idea of community Americans have gained higher material wealth.

Whereas I developed in a family which was tightly knit, most of the kids who are here have gone through life alone, isolated in grade school and high school. They have never belonged to a real family, only a couple of parents, a couple of siblings -- an American mobile urban society. They have no community lives in their memories to which they can compare this Harvard situation.

So in effect a lot of the people at Harvard who are isolated and lonely have come to expect this. It's normal and they will have it for the rest of their lives.

7. After getting father's fortune, it became impossible to go into his business, but my Uncle Sam said he had a fine army

I FOUND IN most of my courses that the professor's reason for giving the course and probably my fellow students' for taking the course were completely different from mine. The professor, he may have been concerned with keeping up his professional status, continuing his research--not interested in education as such but in furthering the discipline. The student taking the course may have been somebody going on to grad school in that discipline and beginning to develop a professional identification with it or it may have been somebody just cranking the grades out in the proper order for the proper fulfillment of his distribution requirements.

There was little personal in the work as such. I proved freshman year to myself that I could just do the work and get by, and I was willing to do that but after awhile I found I just couldn't prostitute myself to get by. It's still too threatening to me personally. Uh, I would, it's sorta the same problem I had in high school of losing myself--I would feel lost--by getting too involved in a middle class venture.

I'd been moving very steadily, very smoothly up the ranks of a society of which I do not feel part. I really do not value money, do not value status, although I would enjoy having positions of status to show I am fit to handle that kind of responsibility and I would have more freedom to do as I please. But I could not take a position of influence if the only way to do it would be to perpetuate a system which in many respects I find corrupt, ineffectual, impersonal. The threat involved in keeping under the system is that I have no outside base from which to keep outside of it to criticize it. I would just become completely enmeshed in it and my personal values would be changed to fit along with it.

I have no objection to picking up academic skills to develop my responsibility fully, but I do object to making that the only purpose and to learning those skills in the context where they have to be used for some specific things.

That's why I'm looking forward to being in the army as opposed to Harvard. Because there I can work and get exercise and although I'll have to take crap and people will order me around all the time, my mind will be free. Nobody there is going to make use of my mind. What will be required of me will be crude enough so I can stand outside of it. Whereas here what's required of me is the utilization of my most personal and most difficult ability--the ability to reform my mind to fit a certain way of thinking. Thta's too much pressure.

SO AFTER getting kicked out of that first Catholic high school, I took a vacation for the rest of the month before going to an easy school, also a Catholic boys' school, where I knew kids from grade school.

There were lots of middle class kids, but not upper middle class, professionals, and a lot of working class kids. It was a tough school, football gang type. No pressure to succeed, in fact just the opposite. I could taxi along very comfortably. I even copied some of the work I had to do from some of the other kids. I adapted to that extent. My first semester I had a 93 average. I was smarter than all but one or two kids in the school so I had no trouble getting by.

8. They told me to see a shrink, but I didn't want to be an SDSer

THE REASON I'm leaving is because I have less expensive tastes. I don't have to have the middle class money status and position to get by in life. I can afford not to go to college. I can feel more comfortable with a group of working class people than a group of highly-motivated kids from New York.

The difference between other dissidents--like the radicals--and me is that most of them, after they have separated themselves from the establishment and Harvard, find something else to identify with. The SDSer can afford to be an SDSer. It's a subculture with its own satisfactions. It may not be particularly useful politically but it satisfies the needs of its members who share the same separation from society. It sorta becomes a private club that has its own values and structure that are as alien to me as the Harvard system or the American system. They escaped from one society to build another one which is sometimes just as bad.

They told me to see a shrink, but I don't want to change. I like myself the way I am. Just because I can't adapt to Harvard doesn't mean in itself that I should go to the shrink and get adapted. What may be best for me is to adapt myself to something better