Finding a Voice

I ATTENDED MY first editorial meeting at The Crimson in December of my first year at Harvard, just minutes after being elected an editor. I sat in uncomfortable silence for more than two hours, listening to the seniors pontificate, knowing that I would never be as certain that I was right about everything as they seemed to be. I left The Crimson that day convinced that I would never speak at an editorial meeting.

Almost four years later--now fairly certain that I am right about almost everything--I sit in editorial meetings, watching the new editors listen to me pontificate, wondering when they will decide to speak, and what they will choose to say.

Our college years provide each of us with a unique opportunity to find a voice. We began to express ourselves before we got here, and we will continue to develop our voices when we leave. But college is a luxury of time, of resources, of energy that can be used to develop not only something important to say, but a distinctive style of saying it.

The business of being a college student is in large part the business of self-expression. Whether it is through speaking in sections and writing papers or through starting a new political organization, starring in a play or writing for a magazine, we spend much of our time here determining how we want to present ourselves.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of debate this year about which students are being silenced and by whom they are being silenced, about who has the right to speak and what they have the right to say, about whether some ideas are more palatable than others and whether some forms of speech are more free than others.

But the very fact of the debate is an indication of how little silence there has actually been. In four years at Harvard we have witnessed the creation of The Peninsula and the Lighthouse, the Association Against Learning in the Absence of Religion and Morality and Defeat Homophobia, the revitalized Republican Club and The Rag collective.

This diverse range of publications and organization calls into question the very notion that some students are being silenced by others. Our campus has become, in fact, the site of vigorous and basically healthy debate as all of us have struggled to find our voices.

The importance of finding a voice in this sense is immediately apparent. The more speech, after all, the better. The more we talk with each other, the more we debate serious issues, the more likely it is that we will make new discoveries, uncover new truths.

Healthy debate prevents good minds from stagnating by forcing us to defend our positions in the face of intelligent opposition. And when debate is truly healthy--which it sometimes is--it will include listening, enough of it so that we may amend our preconceived ideas in the face of particularly reasonable challenges.

Participating in this debate and finding an individual voice is an important personal achievement as well. The better we are able to express ourselves and the more clearly we can defend our ideas, the better we will understand ourselves and our goals.

NOBODY, PERHAPS least of all a Crimson editor, likes to acknowledge what a minimal impact students actually have on this university. But as acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry Rosovsky is fabled to have told a group of students, Harvard will be here forever, an administrator might be here for lifetime and students will be here for only three years. In relative terms, that is just not much.

When we leave, new writers, protesters, speakers, politicians, will take our places and we will, eventually, be forgotten. The din of student debate falls softly on the ears of University Hall administrators and the brevity of our careers means that each of us alone cannot really hope to effect radical change. Year to year, the University will stay about the same and the students will continue to come and go, littering Harvard's halls with hundreds of written pages, but only faint memories of the messages they contained.

The most important thing all of this speaking and writing and protesting and debating can do is to change us, to help us define our own voices. There have been few moments of silence in the past four years at Harvard, but our debate has hardly touched the Ivory Tower. We can only hope that we have touched each other, challenged each other and--perhaps--changed each other.