Don Juan in Law School

I WONDER what would happen if Percy Bysshe Shelley attended Harvard. Would he, as he did at Oxford, send to all professors copies of a pamphlet he wrote entitled "The Necessity of Atheism?" Would he begin the task, as he did in Ireland, of world reformation by organizing a "society of peace and love?" Would he distribute, as he did in Wales, a "Declaration of Rights" by sending up balloons and by enclosing it in bottles he cast into the sea?

More likely, Shelley would have majored in Government and gone on to law school, and, instead of writing "Ode to the West Wind" would have spent most of his time poring over a casebook of contract law. And, doubtless, Widener Library has become the nest of many would-be-Shelleys, who, in earlier days, while not rhapsodizing necessarily on skylarks or writing odes to clouds, might have been less intent on getting accepted to med or business school.

Certainly "preprofessionalism" is the word of the day, and sociologists and columnists can readily provide the statistics supporting their constant use of it. The only thing that changes now is the constant rise in the percentage of undergraduates who plan to go on to some form of professional training.

Harvard is no exception to the national trend, and it seems that the left's joke about Harvard--that it's the training ground for the nation's ruling class--is now being taken seriously. People new talk of their post-graduation life in terms of Washington and Wall Street, and view Harvard as a good place to study because it will provide valuable contacts for their afterlife of politics or finance.

But the preprofessional current runs deeper than the increasing numbers flocking on to institutions of higher training. As the quiescence of the seventies has replaced the flourish of the sixties, so has a grim realism become prevalent where previously experimentation and romanticism ruled the day. I can still picture Shelley, at least, in the middle of a Socratic dialogue with an obstreperous law professor, standing on his seat and singing La Marseillaise, or histrionically reciting a soliloquy from Shakespeare. Today, however, such romantic elan seems completely incongruous, and, in those rare instances when someone calls up an outlandish dream or invokes an outrageous vision, the individual is dismissed as a utopian or an eccentric.

Conversation at Harvard is governed by certain tacit rules that preclude the expression of "childish" hopes and desires. "Naive" and "simplistic" are the guns cynics call out when someone commits a blunder, and, if one persists, the ultimate disapproval of "romantic" is mouthed and salving looks are nodded. Brass tacks puncture floating balloons.

Like everything else at Harvard, the two cultures of romanticism and realism have roots in the past. The doctrine of the preprofessionals is a recapitulation of the harsh imperatives of the Mather brothers, increase and Cotton, whose fire-and-brimstone Puritanism set a precedent for perseverence along the path of industrious virtue. Henry Adams did not attend law school, but his description of his education here is now heard repeated every day while passing through the streets of Harvard Square: "Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with the all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones."

In the present century, Oliver Wendell Holmes's legal opinions are preserved as models of lucidity for undergraduates writing essays on admissions applications. T.S. Eliot articulated the equivocations that would plague a later generation when he inquired, "Do I dare top eat a peach?" And John Kennedy, a paragon of the man holding the reigns of power, advocated no starry-eyed idealism but a more tangible ethic that sanctioned the sending of troops to Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs.

BUT IN THE STREETS of Cambridge, outside the gates of Harvard Yard and its stately monuments like Emerson and University halls, lurk the spirits of Harvard's other culture. Once the heroes of a more feisty crew of students, these refugees from Bohemia stand as reminders of an alternatives approach to the Harvard education. Among the bars and cafes and magazine Kiosks shuffle the likes of Richard Henry Dana, one of the first of many undergraduates to exercise the option of the leaves of absence, by departing after his second year to spend two years before the mast and see the world. There is John Reed, who used his Harvard education to help him write poetry in Greenwich Village, to cover the Mexican Revolution as a news correspondent and to write a book on the Russian Revolution that would lead to the adoption of his names as the titles of Communist groups in America. James Agee, who traveled to the South to report on the life of the rural poor, wrote that his favorite things about going to school at Harvard were "Boston Common with an actor and hangover and peanuts and pigeons, midafternoon; the New England Boxing Tournament, for steady unsparing (if unskilful) ferocity; East Boston for swell houses, stunted trees struck through with mordant street lamps, and general diapidation..."

THE REAL difference between the two traditions and their corresponding contemporary mentalities becomes apparent not in the seminar room, nor in the dining hall or common room. The contrast between the realists and the romantics becomes most evident in the movie theater, where films like Casablanca, La Guerre Est Finie and Five East Pieces attract people of both the realist and romantic schools. But their reactions to the films are likely to occupy opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. After watching Humphrey Bogart lose his women at the airport, after witnessing Yves Montand's dangerous political activities in France, after watching Jack Nicholson board a freight truck for Alaska, the realist is liable to yawn, comment that it was a "good flick," and go happily to Brigham's for ice cream before returning to study.

The romantic, on the other hand, after coming out of the theater, will blink in the glow of the streetlight's as he slowly comes to realize that no, he is not in Africa, not France nor the Pacific Northwest. Cambridge at the moment is distasteful to him, and, as he sits in a cafe sipping his espresso, the future becomes not further education nor a steady profession, but a series of places where a political struggle remains to be won, where a woman waits to be conquered, where a challenging task awaits the man equal to it.

The movie house stands as one of the few refuges of the romantic spirit at Harvard. The inroads made by the realism of preprofessionalism fortunately cannot penetrate this archive of a disappearing Harvard tradition. Perhaps one day the spirit will re-emerge, and, like Shelley's Prometheus, refuse to go to law school.