Rating Rudenstine's Words, Year by Year

Afunny thing happened on the way back to the river houses a few Sundays ago. I was walking through the Yard when I noticed a small gathering of several thousand people seated neatly in folding chairs in front of Memorial Church. At first, I took little notice. In my past two years at Harvard, I have come to accept things like that as completely typical-you know, like those evenings when you walk into the dining hall and see a chamber orchestra and ten deans lined up in black tie to greet you for an "elegant meal," or those Saturdays when you roll out of bed and into the Square and slowly realize that there is a moonwalk the size of your dorm sitting in the middle of Mass Ave.

But as I tried to pass alongside the impromptu audience in the Yard and heard the unmistakable cadences of President Neil L. Rudenstine's voice over the loudspeakers, I suddenly realized what was going on: opening exercises for the Class of 2001. In a fit of nostalgia, or perhaps just the ambling curiosity of a junior who fondly remembers her days in Canaday, I took a seat on the steps of Widener and eavesdropped as dean after dean warned the first years about what to expect before the millennium was up. As I glanced around the Yard, I noticed that aside from a few people in the choirs and the band, and maybe a few alumni parents, I was the only person there who could judge whether or not the first years were hearing the truth.

Rudenstine, in his impeccable style, was talking about how college was a "journey" and an "adventure." Things would change, he told the Class of 2001. You may have arrived this week at Harvard with a firm idea of who you are and what you will become, but by the end of first semester, you might discover that you no longer want to be a doctor or a businessperson or "God help us, a lawyer." Instead, he explained in the sort of wistful voice that only academics can affect, you might discover a passion for the English Palladians (whoever they are), or for Ugaritic texts, or for the life and times of airborne spores. And while you might have difficulty convincing your parents or friends that airborne spores really are your calling, you should follow the soaring path to which those glorious spores will lead you. (This all sounded far more convincing when amplified by loudspeakers.)

Various and sundry deans then spoke about the glories of student organizations, the history of the quest for knowledge and the wonders of living in a place occupied by generations of ghosts. The band played, the choirs sang and, after a handful of hip-hips for Harvard, a smattering of rah-rahs for Radcliffe, a few more prescient words and a "Bon Voyage!" from Rudenstine, the crowd disbanded as the first years set off on their journeys and adventures.

The entire show was more or less the same as it had been my first year. I remember listening to these same speeches, hearing the Glee Club singing "Fair Harvard" and thinking how I would soon know all the words by heart. (I haven't heard the song since.) As a first year sitting in one of those folding chairs, I thought hard about what Rudenstine and all the other speakers said and decided that they must be right. Yes, I was sure, I would change my mind about what I wanted to study. Within a year's time, I would become incredibly interested in some subject I could barely imagine now. My horizons would be broadened. These strangers sitting next to me would become my closest friends.

But during Opening Exercises for 1995 and 1997, the officers of the University failed to point out the most important transformation in store for us. The great change ahead wasn't that we would change our concentrations from economics to folklore & mythology. It was that we would change our ages from around 18 to around 22, and that is a far bigger difference.

As a first year, I don't think I quite understood the magnitude of that change. I had studied hard for four years in high school, and aside from spending time with my family, I believed that academics were far more crucial than other people. I sensed that the people I knew in high school weren't going to be as important to me as those I might meet later, and like many of my classmates here, I deferred life for a bit, postponing the usual adolescent sagas until there was something or someone really worth my love and my pain. It wasn't until I came to Harvard that people finally bothered to lie to me, or bothered to entrust me with their private truths-to tell me anything that mattered to them, in fact. It wasn't until I came to Harvard that I began caring about people enough to hate them-or to love them.

When I sat in one of those folding chairs three years ago, I was dumb enough to think of what Rudenstine said about "journeys" and "adventures" in terms of classes. As for the "life" part, well, I figured that it would be sort of like a high school summer program, the kind of thing where I could go home after a few months and say that the people were "amazing." What made people "amazing," as far as I could discern, was that they were really, really smart.

What I didn't realize was that when half your classmates composed original symphonies at the age of seven, "smart" doesn't really matter that much anymore. Instead, what matters is being able to see past your own intelligence to other things that are far more important-and far more impressive. Sure, some would-be doctors did end up getting really into spores. But even for them, the "journey" that started a few Septembers ago really didn't have that much to do with Harvard at all. It was life, not "college," but real life-that wandering and bludgeoning beast that withers in the lights of libraries and labs but roams and spawns in shared bedrooms and dirty bathrooms and over yet another meal of pasta and sauce-that was going to attack us during the next four years.

On that September day in 1995, we of the Class of 1999 looked at each other, wondering which ones of us would become heads of state, who among us would discover a cure for epilepsy, which pairs of people in the crowd would become husbands and wives, but we mostly thought about that exciting and formidable pronouncement that one of the speakers made, that this would be the last time our entire class would be sitting in one place until we reunited for Commencement in June of 1999.

None of us bothered to think that maybe the most important people we would meet at Harvard weren't even here yet, or that some of those wonderfully well-adjusted people we had met the day before would crack before second semester, or that three of our classmates would be dead before junior year. Yes, Harvard Yard is occupied by ghosts: not the ghosts of the Cabots and the Lowells, but the ghosts of the people who we used to know and the people who we used to be.

For the Class of 2001, I would like to add the following words of wisdom to the many you have already heard. The moment that Harvard will reward you is not the moment when you forge your greatest ties to the University, or even when you get that job or make that leap through the connections and thinking that you gained here, but rather the moment when something or someone that is distinctly non-Harvard-even though you might find that someone or something here-becomes more important to you than Harvard itself, when you succeed in taking what Harvard has given you, whether something you searched for or something you stumbled upon, and manage to make it larger than Harvard, to make it into life. And then you will be able to pass through Harvard Yard without too much nostalgia.