Breaking The Gap Mold

I was walking through the Yard the other day, surrounded by brick buildings, under the canopy of green trees, feeling exhilarated about Harvard life and the year to come. I took a deep breath of the crisp Cambridge air and stopped along the path to take a look at my fellow Harvard students. I was greeted with a sea of similarity.

Everyone walking around me was wearing a slight variation on the same color scheme. You've seen it, the Gap line: inoffensive, uninspiring and uninspired, with an occasional light blue thrown in for creative good measure. Almost all were wearing jeans and most everyone had something tied around his or her waist. Although these people didn't look like they'd stepped off the pages of a J. Crew catalogue, it appeared as though they tried very hard to make it seem like they did.

A quick, but essential, tangent: I, too, fit the mold. In my blue jeans and monochrome sweater that wasn't even light blue, I blended into the crowd just as well as everyone else. I don't exclude myself from this critique. Quite the contrary: I am writing out of concern and discouragement about myself and my friends and this campus that belongs to all of us.

Luckily, or frighteningly, this seems to be a national phenomenon, not a Harvard-specific one. A professor recently quoted an October 13, 1993 article in the Boston Globe, still disconcertedly timely, in which Michael Grunwald christened this trend the Gapification of America. (Ironically enough, not only did most of the people in the class look the part, but two women were wearing nearly identical Gap flannel shirts over their light blue jeans). In this ultimate triumph of Gap culture," Grunwald writes, we are players in and spectators of the "commercial homogenization of the middle classes."

Grunwald continues: "The Gap...makes us blend into a crowd of casual, comfortable clothing." In a metaphor that is almost poetic, Grun-wald explains: With the pocket t-shirts and cotton turtlenecks grouped into small, medium, large and extra large, "the Gap fits everybody. It provides the sartorial equivalent of the Big Tent, welcoming America's diverse multitude of grossly misshapen bodies into the comforting embrace of its loose fitting" sweaters.

Although it's nice to know that the Gap has provided our society with a much needed bridge between and across groups, it has simultaneously created an ethos of conformity in which it is easier and more acceptable to look and act and think like everyone else than it is to stand a little outside the multitude in proud disformity, so to speak.

In many ways, we Harvardians fit Grunwald's description. The Independent survey of late last year found that Harvard is overwhelmingly middle and upper-middle, if not upper, class. We are disproportionately educated in private schools and grew up in or near major cities. And, although the Independent didn't check out this statistic, it is also true that most of us wear clothes from the Gap.

But don't let the similarities fool you, or discourage you. Underneath the "inconspicuous stripes and the inoffensive solids," we are one of the most interesting and vibrant and exciting and diverse communities of people that will ever come together with a common purpose and a shared experience. In one of his welcoming pieces to the Class of '98, President Neil L. Rudenstine alluded to this unique and powerful character of the Harvard community, and he was right. There will probably never be another moment in our lives when we are surrounded by so many intelligent, thoughtful, different people from whom to learn and with whom to grow.

It is easy to look around and see sameness, to find friends that echo your interests and backgrounds and agree with your world views. And sometimes (especially in this post-randomization era) friends like that are important. But sameness gets boring and stagnates quickly. In our dining halls (if not in our third-place classrooms) we have the unique opportunity for the most incredible learning of our lifetimes as we explore together in search of a fit for all the peculiarities of our size and self--small, medium, large and otherwise.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott's column appears on alternate Saturdays.