Where the Intellectuals Are

At Harvard, a place known for its scholarship, it is ironically all too easy to forget the academic and the intellectual. Extracurricular activities dwarf course work, and students try to outdo each other by discussing how little they studied for a midterm or how few pages of the reading they did. Over my three and a half years here, I admit that I have been guilty more often than I would like of sacrificing course work on the altar of newspaper duties or somnolence.

But in this spring semester of my senior year, a blessedly and unexpectedly calm time, I have found myself grasping at the intellectual. Maybe it is because I am facing the real world, realizing that reading a novel in the afternoon does not count as work in the great beyond. Maybe it is because I am taking more electives than ever before. Or maybe it is because my last five courses at Harvard seem all too few and too late.

Regardless of the reason, three factors over the past month have made me grateful to be sheltered by an institution where learning is valued and study required: attending stimulating classes, participating in a dissertation colloquium and finishing my senior thesis.

First, my classes this semester are consistently challenging, both in reading and in lectures. I am learning about the themes of American women writers, the scope of African-American literature, the range of California authors and the Rome of Augustus. Sated with a reasonable amount of sleep, I find myself arguing in my head with the professor during lecture and later going to office hours. I write notes in the margins about books I should check out from the library--and then I actually check them out. My mind spins during lecture with links to other books I have read and other periods I have studied.

Everything I am studying seems important, and every week the assigned books jump off the shelf in their brilliance and importance. The past two weeks alone encompassed Virgil's Aeneid, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk and Frank Norris' The Octopus. I am even looking forward to reviewing for my oral exam this May, because the process will give me the chance to re-read and reconsider great books.

Second, a few weeks ago I attended a dissertation colloquium in Robinson Hall. The room was filled with professors, graduate students and undergraduates--all there to listen to a graduate student present his first chapter and to give suggestions. I expected it to be like a poor undergraduate section, with everyone putting in his or her two cents just for the sake of talking. Instead, it became a real discussion, with professors building on the points of undergraduates and vice versa. Everyone left that room with new thoughts about the dissertation topic. It revealed an intellectual side of Harvard that undergraduates rarely see.

Third, and perhaps most important, I turned in my thesis last Friday. When I began the process last spring, I was interested in my topic of a southern California architect cast as a historical Progressive, but I was not looking forward to all the research. And, as expected, I did not revel in every one of the hundreds of hours I spent poring over books, articles, and archives.

But as I began writing seriously in January, I realized that I knew enough about my subject to write as an authority. I started to craft words and ideas and engage with the thought of other historians. And at one point deep in February, the project became fully mine; not the half-cooked product of haphazardly throwing together other scholars' foot-notes, but a paper with its own spirit. As much as I scoffed at the thought a year ago, the thesis did end up becoming a "capstone experience" of my academic career.

It is all too easy to become enamored of coursework in senior spring, when extracurriculars have ended and the weeks stretch out as long blocks of free time. But, as easy as it is to become distracted by Harvard's myriad extracurricular offerings, the fruits of knowledge are there for the taking. It is our responsibility to seize them so that, as Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey '28 wrote of his undergraduate years here, "each day [will be] filled with...fresh ideas and excited inspiration to read and go on learning."

Sarah J. Schaffer's column appears on alternate Fridays.