They Will Try to Get You to Sell Out

THE DAY I first arrived at Harvard, Boston was in the hot cycle, the humid sticky horrible part of its nature. In Boston, people boil half the time and freeze the other half. It is called forced adaptation. The hot cycle is for halters, for lying undressed on your bed trying to shake off the lethargy, and for ice cream cones with jimmies.

Harvard is the jimmies, something on top that does not cost anything extra. The jimmies are the part that make you feel good. it is not the ice cream or the sugar cone, but the little sprinkles--the jimmies, that make life at Harvard as comfortable as it is, or will be.

On that first day, I had never heard of jimmies. I was nervous to a peak, trying to play down my own feelings of pride at having arrived at the great mecca of learning, the university with the golden streets. I put my Sony clock-radio on the window sill and raised the first floor window full-height. My parents, yes, they were there, horrified, reminding me that Cambridge is full of crime. My radio would be stolen by a meandering hand at any moment. I scoffed. And then I moved the radio.

Two days later we had our get together-with-the-proctor meeting on sex, drugs, liquor, and crime. And two minutes later, a freshman from Texas was missing his $500 radio, stolen while we were across the hall listening to warnings about underage girls. The next day, the Texan came back from the Square bearing agreat weight--a new stereo to replace the stolen one.

And thus my first lesson--roll with the punches.

The important part of the lesson is not the punches, it is the rolling. Rolling is like jimmies. Jimmies come in a package deal with a cone; rolling comes in a package with Harvard.

What you will learn at Harvard most of all is not chemistry or economics or anything as academic as that. Some people go on to be great professors, or great writers, or something. But most of all you learn to take the path of least resistance. And at Harvard, that means the path to respectability, to being part of the leadership in the great American game.

In short, you will be coopted. Professors call it socialization. New Englanders may say something about learning to be gentlemen. And some presumptuous fools think they are just assuming their proper god-given place in the high ranks of mankind. Nevertheless, you will be coopted.

Granted, Harvard starts out with a sort of cream of the crop-probably more honor society members and high school quarterbacks than anyone needs. And, yes, brains mix with brains, producing some fine academic work and some excellent extracurricular groups. But most of all, you will be courted to join the legion of leaders.

No one will bother you, tell you what to do, or notice when you skip a class. Heaven forbid a professor or student telling you how to live your life. They are not saying grow up on your own, learn to be a man, but rather, come and join the ranks of gentlemen, it's so good I doubt you can resist for long.

And sure enough, most Harvard students learn to accept the disinterest as a show of faith, as some demonstration that Harvard, the great inhuman institution, believes its sons will voluntarily join the elite.

The greatness of Harvard and the myth of Harvard are intertwined to be one. You may be the stupidest moron, and people will listen to you. if you major in economics, friends at home will ask you what you think of Nixon's economic policies. You will probably not understand those policies, may not even know they exist, and certainly will have nothing very useful or original to say, but people will listen. And you will be on the way to becoming a gentleman. You are being coopted.

At Harvard you will live in a spacious room. You will have the greatest university library system in the world. You will have comfortable leather chairs. Your textbooks will be authored by your professor.

And the country's leadership will be calling. President Kennedy, for instance got The Crimson every day at the White House. Harvard students soon get accustomed to dealing with important people. One day John T. Dunlop is dean of the Faculty, the next he is director of the Cost of Living Council. One day Archibald Cox is a professor of Law, the next he is chief Watergate prosecutor. They are saying, join us, be coopted, it is easy.

You will have to study some, but not too much. You are even allowed to be bright, to question everything the country does or challenge every word ever uttered about Ulyssess. However, there is one thing you cannot question--the place of the elite.

Most Harvard students, I would say, are coopted. Those who are already members of Brahmin society stay there. Those just beneath jump at the opportunity to wear club ties, to wallow in the comfortable life.

Students take different tacks, some relying on friendships and others on study. Both paths work. Gentlemen do not believe in the strict merit system, they hire friends because they know and trust them. Gentlemen also enjoy competence, and hire the best new crop of lawyers or MBAs. And if you are one of the best and the brightest, why not work for the wealthy and the powerful and take the fringe benefits?

By going to Harvard, you are almost destined to be part of the top. To reach the top, all you have to do is follow the game plan, roll with the punches, take the path of least resistance. The good life rubs off on every Harvard student, each one gaining a familiarity with comfort. Contempt for this comfort is rare, most are willing to passively accept it, a few even grovel for it. If you do not make any decision about what you want to do, in essence you will have decided to take the easy road and become coopted.

Perhaps most amazing is that student radicals who were at the heart of the 1968-1970 disruptions have now chosen the easy life. Students who fought the police at University Hall, students who were ready to close the University, are now studying law, medicine, and business. They carry some spark with them from the rebellions, but for the most part they have chosen comfort.

The turnabout is complete. in 1969, the University was so threatened that a group of vigilante professors set up a round-the-clock guard in Widener Library to protect the books and catalog. Early this year, when The Crimson held its centennial celebration a Crimson editor from the Class of '70 sent his check for the dinner with a note on embossed stationary from Washington magazine where he works. In fountain pen script, the note started: "My wife, Debbie, and I..." The turnabout is complete.

One must actively choose to give up the good life in order to displace the system of the elite. Radicalism on campus is not necessarily the way to fight the system, studying day and night may be preferable. To make valuable counter-offers to our society, you must be an expert, ready to stand by your conscience.

Thus when Paul M. Sweezy '31, a leading Marxist economist, spoke at Harvard last January, he told of the situation in 1940 when he was ushered out of his position as an economics instructor. "The Economics Department never did me a greater favor," he said. Daniel Ellsberg '52, speaking in Lowell Lecture Hall in 1972, warned students to stay out of the "center of the web," noting that Harvard graduates had almost singlehandedly engineered a decade of death and destruction in Indochina.

The warnings by Sweezy and Ellsberg are worth taking to heart. They spoke of refusing to take the easy road, of making the hard decision to abandon "success" in favor of conscience. They are also unusual cases, for they came out of it standing up, prominent in their own counter-societies.

So if nothing else comes out of four years at Harvard, you will have to decide whether or not to take the path of least resistance. The dilemma, of course, is that the easy life comes for free. If you are lazy, it is the only way to go. If you want to get rid of the jimmies, you have to shake them off.