Little Fish in a Big Pond

High school principals, as a rule, seem fond of imparting to their college-bound seniors the wisdom that although they are now big fish in the little pond of Hometown High, they soon will find themselves little fish in the big ponds of the college campuses of their choice--faced with the excitement and danger of a new world.

I never found either my high school principal or cliches terribly insightful, but this metaphor seems strangely applicable to Harvard. Its educational ocean is filled with more than the normal complement of sharks and barracuda, electric eels and suckers: and to most people, just how they will find their place in the land of Neptune-in-Cambridge is as mysterious as the location of sunken Atlantis.

So they swim along in different fashions, facing and conquering some fish, losing to others, occasionally getting snarled in seaweed. Some rise to the surface, even leaping out for a breath of real air; others plunge to the depths.

Just where an undergraduate fits into this is difficult to fathom. Of the 16,000 or so students here, about 6200--slightly under 40 per cent--are going through their first four years of higher education. Of the 4300-some instructors, 763 are voting members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which most often comes in contact with undergraduates and which spends about one-fourth of the university's $200-million budget.

Philosophically, however, the interest devoted to and effort expended on undergraduate education vary with the times and with the people who govern Harvard at any one point. Some--Charles William Eliot, Class of 1853, or James Bryant Conant '14, for example--made it clear they felt undergraduate education was the administration's primary concern: with others--Nathan M. Pusey '28 and Derek C. Bok--the priorities are not so clear. While Harvard's internal policies change, its reputation in the outside world does not. Ask an East Coast student what Harvard is and he'll tell you it's a rich, elite Ivy League college. Ask an educator, and he'll tell you it's got perhaps the best reputation around, although maybe not as good as in the "old days."

Ask a Harvard-Radcliffe student, however, and you're likely to get a dumbfounded look.

Many people don't realize what they're doing here until they leave; some people never realize at all. A lucky few have a concrete conception of their purpose and tailor their four years in Cambridge to fit it. But somehow almost everyone learns how to cope.

Although, according to surveys, most Harvard-Radcliffe students would like to make friends with professors and regularly hold enlightened conversations--something Harvard portrays in its recruitment literature with alacrity--relatively few actually do, and many find after four years that no one professor knows them by first name.

Some students compensate by finding a special niche of the world's knowledge to call their own, and spend four years ferreting out every available piece of information on it from Harvard's libraries, which usually seem far more available if less personable.

Others involve themselves in extracurricular activities--sometimes exclusively--deciding that they are more educational than what Harvard's course catalogue has to offer; that the people involved are easier to approach; and that, in some ways, they present an easier way for students to regain the "big fish" status that they enjoyed earlier. Or they take it slightly further, trying for an even bigger-fish status by joining the university's political power structure.

And some flee altogether--by choice or by Administrative Board edict--to the outside world for a time, to puzzle things out and try to determine where they fit into Harvard, and where it fits into their life.

This Dump Truck is about these different styles of handling Harvard.