With a Little Help From the Yenching

Yenching, a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Holyoke Street and Mass. Ave., was the only place to eat in Harvard Square on Christmas Day. So as I had decided to spend most of Winter Break at Harvard attending to some previously neglected thesis work, the Yenching it was this Christmas.

I've never seen the place as packed as it was that day, full--from what I could tell over some egg rolls and a plate of chicken-fried rice--with Asians and fellow Jews. I'm guessing from the icicles on my nose that it was damn cold outside, so the crooked sign hanging in the window, "Yenching--Open Until 11," was a most welcome sight. And in the warmth of the restaurant, drinking hot tea and reading the New York Times in the company of others for whom Jesus's birthday is simply another occasion to go to the movies, I knew that staying in Cambridge over the break had been the right decision.

My time spent in the labyrinthine Leverett Towers, which, let's just say, were brisk at night, inspired a different kind of enthusiasm, one which had more to do with not being in college anymore than it did with imagining, if only briefly, an America full of Jews and Asians. This is to say that being at Harvard for academics when Harvard is not in session--when the libraries are operating on limited hours, the dining halls are closed, and, yeah, The Crimson is not coming out--is a different experience from being here during the semester, and different in a good way.

In a sense, there is a greater feeling of purpose about the work you are doing; the romantic conception of scholars living the life of the mind comes true for a moment. My phone all but stopped ringing, my in-box achieved some stasis, and I didn't have to be anywhere--at all; there were just a pile of unread books, ideas waiting to be hatched, and a lot of time.

Reading period is supposed to be like this. You don't have to shave, or go to class (unless you made the wrong decision sometime in September), and you have a lot of work to do. But as everyone is aware, reading period is only a more intense version of the semester, a scramble to get everything done.

Honest immersion in one's studies, of the type which writing a good thesis demands, for example, is a pipe dream both during the semester and during reading period, in large part because it is not the objective of college to inspire such focus. The raw amount of reading, writing, problem sets we have assigned to us indicates that the emphasis in college lies on quantity and method, not quality. Rigid paper deadlines, which are an otherwise meaningless convention, illustrate this point.

So, is all this to actually try to say that my winter vacation, spent studying minority integration between smoked turkey sandwiches at Bruegger's and No. 28s at Pho Pasteur, was better than yours? Not exactly. It's not even to say that a Harvard education emphasizes the wrong aspects. Quite the opposite, really. For it is not the purpose of college to enable a life of the mind. It is to teach students how to think and approach problems, and to discover what moves them, precisely so that when we finally do leave, we may find something interesting and inspiring to do with ourselves.

There is one catch, however: senior theses. For these are supposed to be an attempt at serious scholarship, and not, as they often end up being, just another class among four. Some professor once even said that most senior theses are not worth the paper they're written on. I don't doubt that this is true--which means, if nothing else, that I hope the Yenching is open during intersession.

Daniel M. Suleiman is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.