College: The Selfish Life

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain

One of America's greatest attributes is its ability to foster and nurture competing conceptions of the good life. The hardest part for many of us, however, is trying to figure out just what the good life is. The other day, a friend of mine claimed to have figured it out: "College is the good life," he proclaimed.

The logic goes something like this: on the academic side, we go to class for a few hours a week, read interesting books and articles and maybe write a few papers during the semester; on the extracurricular side, we play a sport, act a little or teach grade school children how to dance. The rest of our time in college is divided between eating as much as we want, meeting new people our age every day and having interesting conversations over a couple of beers.

But one attribute Harvard students are cursed with is that we imbue so much of what we do with Significance, and this makes college not seem as easy-going as the description above implies it is. That is, we think most of what we are doing here bears large consequences for the rest of our lives; and this raises stress levels to an often unhealthy height.

What we study at college could theoretically determine our futures; certainly pre-med students depend on their performance, and computer science and engineering concentrators leave with skills they will be able to use immediately after graduation. But even these students are not locked in by the choices they make today.

The most important aspect of a college education is the way you learn to think--about ideas, about the world and about yourself--not what you decide to study. Even theses, those roughly 100-page projects that seniors are completing this month and next, which are the culmination of four years of academic growth, are inconsequential. They don't matter for the rest of our lives, they probably won't be related to what we end up doing and for the most part, they will not contribute to the relevant field of scholarship. They only matter--and this is of course very important--for the maturation of their authors. Theses, not unlike the thousands upon thousands of pages of Core course papers handed in every semester, may, in the words of one government professor, not be worth the paper on which they are written.

But seniors do, and should, obsess about their theses. Our ability to place as much importance as we do every decision we make and every paper we write is one of the indulgences college allows. And this indulgence can be seen in most aspects of college life. College students are selfish, caught up in their lives and usually their lives only, because they can be; our activities (even our altruistic ones) primarily serve us: they help us grow and develop our conceptions of the good life. And they don't matter too much in the grand scheme of things. Students are expected to make mistakes, and we can change our minds (our concentrations, our plans, our careers, etc.) when we wish.

When I asked Dean of the College and McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R. Lewis '68 whether or not he thought college was an essentially selfish period, he answered with a resounding "No."

"At Harvard," Lewis wrote in an e-mail message, "we try to create an environment where students can be as selfless as possible...[B]y comparison with the world outside and beyond Harvard, where people get on career tracks, want to do well in order to protect and provide for their loved ones, become geographically immobilized, etc., I think college--this one anyway--provides a rare moment, when most students are at a critical stage of their development, to open up rather than closing down and drawing in on themselves."

Lewis was adamant about defending the role of the institution in fostering cooperation among students: Participation in "choral music, Model UN, debating, theatre, yes even journalism...teaches pride in excellence, but also lessons in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts in a way that I hope people remember after they graduate."

But learning these values does not preclude students from being selfish as well. It is, in fact, the institutional structure that enables students to concentrate on themselves. To the same question I asked Dean Lewis about whether or not college was a selfish period, Henry Rubin, a lecturer on social studies, responded, "Most definitely. [College] is one of the last times that you get the kind of intensive institutional support for guiding you through life choices that will matter to your life chances...Most of all, you haven't yet made the kinds of decisions that `lock' you into any particular course of action."

My mother was a chemistry major before going to graduate school in French. My father was an economics major before going to graduate school in political science. I'm a social studies concentrator and I'm not sure what I want to do--and though I will stress about this decision, to the point of destroying my conception of college as the good life, the nice thing is that it doesn't matter just yet.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.