Fifteen Minutes: A Table with Big Mouths
They rule your section, they interrupt your professors, they answer questions you didn't ask. They live to pow-wow through Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) cabinet meetings, posture in Undergraduate Council focus groups and recite the Saturday morning Crimson Key tour. They are the bull-horn-toting-riot-causing ring leaders, the creme de la creme of undergraduate pseudo-intellectual literati, the "Dan Lungren's new best friend" gov jocks. Join us for an evening chat with Harvard's 15 biggest mouths.
Kamil E. Redmond '00
History and Literature and Women's Studies
David B. Orr '01
Social Studies
Bryan W. Leach '01
Social Studies
Daniel B. Baer '00
Social Studies and Afro-American Studies
Erin Brinkman '00
Government
Jeannie A. Lang '00
American History
Dan L. Wagner '03
History and Literature
Anne L. Berry '01
Economics
Shai M. Sachs '01
Computer Science
Adam V. Kline '01
Social Studies
Mikey K.T. Tan '01
Literature
Gautam Mukunda '01
Government
Arden Oconnor '00
English
Saadi Soudavar '00
Literature
Mike D. Shumsky '00
Social Studies
FM: David, what that is that button?
David: This is a "Fuck the Bullshit" button. Kamil is also sporting one of these little things.
FM: Is this referring to the Harvard administration?
Kamil: Oh my god... (noticeably disturbed)
Thirteen people interrupt and begin muttering to one another. Above the noise level, a voice emerges, protesting.
Jeannie: I LOVE Dean Lewis!
Discourse interrupted, pandemonium ensues.
David: (breaks into song) Fuck the bullshiiiit (holds note).
Jeannie: I was sitting at a table with him this summer and he watched his wife [Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73] speak about the time that they met, and he cried. I will hold a huge soft spot for that man for the rest of my life.
Anne: That's really touching.
Adam: And he really does a lot for the kids, too.
Kamil: (raises voice well above the noise level) He is a TOTAL (restrains herself briefly)... I think that his personality is so anti-everything. No consideration whatso...
Kamil is cut off by six people, all grappling for the stage
An uproar makes it difficult to identify the speaker. One "big mouth" mentions how he confused astronomy and astrology. Another questions how bright the man is.
Gautam: (Uttering a high-pitched squeal) Aiiii! Alright-alright. Let's...back away. No one becomes a dean in the Harvard administration by being dumb. It's absurd!
Kamil: (Dismissively) I don't think you need to be a truly intelligent person to be a dean.
Snickers and guffaws from around the table.
Kamil: I don't go to University Hall and expect to be surrounded by brilliance. I go to University Hall and go, "knock, knock, knock... Hellooooo?"
David: (chiming in) "Who are you? Like, why aren't you dealing with the series of problems on this campus?"
Arden: What ARE these series of problems?
Raised voices overlap one another.
David: Sexual violence, homophobia...
Arden: No. We are the most blessed...and no one wants to admit it...
David: ...We may be lucky, but that does not mean we have to...
Adam: I think, I think there is just a different vision of, like what we would want the school to be like and what he would want the school to be like.
Discourse interrupted. Pandemonium ensues.
Jeannie: It's got to be myopic to work in the same place and basically spend your whole life in the same institution...
David: We need people to think critically. They think Harvard's amazing and they want to leave it the way that it is.
Gautam: Let me just say something...It is possible that we as the students, do not have the best perspective on what is best for the long term... (cut off)
David: We have a persp...
Gautam: David, I let you talk. Return the favor... and it is possible that one of the rules of the administration is to give a longer term perspective of people who have spent more time here and sometimes, inevitably, those things conflict with what the students want because we haven't seen as much as they have. At the least I think we owe them some degree of respect for the attainments that they have to become Harvard administrators. It's not easy, guys...
Dan B: I feel like I am listening to the evil guest on the McNeil, Lehrer Show.
Laughter, clapping.
Bryan: (looking at a list of possible "a table" conversation topics) Oh my God! Why isn't PBHA on this list?!
Anne: (shocked) Whaat?
Discourse interrupted. Pandemonium ensues.
Bryan: (shouting over noise) It BOGGLES the mind, it BOGGLES the mind, how much bureaucracy there is at PBH.
Mikey: PBH has serious problems.
Kamil: It's the only good thing on this campus.
David: I know!
Arden: (gasping) It shouldn't be eliminated!
Bryan: How many of you have been to a cabinet meeting for PBH?
David: (nonchalant) I'm a board member.
Bryan: Well, seriously if you want to pass the resume around, we can all read it and get back to you.
Room bursts out laughing.
Bryan: My point is that, nobody in the organization wanted to represent an organization at any retreat at any cabinet meeting because it was way too much bureaucracy to wade through; there was quorum this and I hereby second the third motion to consider the fifty-fifth motion of sub-section 47b. And also there were all sorts of enforced meetings at times when nobody really wanted to have meetings for the sake of having a meeting and having an itinerary and free pizza. It was so stupid. The organization should be streamlined in every program...
David: But the fact that there is bureaucracy does not mean it is a bad organization...
Bryan: I completely agree that it is a terrific organization. To have an umbrella organization is extremely valuable for...
Mikey: (in a high pitched plea) Excuse meeeeee? I'm not convinced that PBH is doing a good enough job making sure all the volunteers are thinking critically about the stuff they are working on.
Erin: You are never going to get Harvard kids to think critically and...
David: And does this mean if kids can't think critically then they shouldn't do any sort of service at all?
Bryan: (frustrated) No one is SAYING that!
Noise level rises; exchanges overlap.
David: I agree that something can be...
Gautam: I would just question that...
Mikey: I believe that it can do more harm than...
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
Gautam: No, I don't think Harvard is overrated! I am taking a class from Sam Huntington, once a week...
Bryan: He sucks; he's the worst teacher I have ever had.
Guffaws circulate around the table.
Gautam: I go to seminars at the Weatherhead Center. This year, I have gone to speeches, interacted with, more like asked questions, of the likes of King Abdullah II of Jordan, the president of Costa Rica, and the foreign minister of Greece...You can't do that anywhere else, it's an amazing experience.
Kamil: And a lot of these superstar professors, like my thesis adviser, who has skipped five meetings with me...Thank you, thank you... Skip Gates. They're on CNN; they never talk to students.
Arden: But wasn't the quality of the professors and the quality of the academics a minor consideration in your coming to this school?
Mikey: I think those of us who are in the smaller concentrations, like women's studies, like literature, like social studies, are very fortunate and do get a lot of attention from the professors.
Dan B: Social studies? social studies does not have any professors. Social studies is how much can we torture these kids so they can feel cool.
Bryan: The other side of this professors thing, it's what you make of the experience. Every semester I have been able to take a class with fewer than 10 people and a professor, establish a relationship with that person, end up having e-mail contact with that person afterwards...
Mikey: What I'm missing on this campus is a sense of intellectual community and that there are so many scores of students that are really invested in disavowing, like, their student-ness. Like, "Oh my god, I have so much reading and I haven' t done any of it and I went to the Grille last night and got really drunk and I never do my work and blah, blah, blah." English concentrators come up to me and say, "I have so many books to read!" And I say, "why are you in English?" I'm just looking for people to get together with me and sit with a book. I know that sounds really nerdy, but in a coffee house and just like sit and read...
Jeannie: We were chosen to come here for our vibrancy of thinking, for our impressive and interesting thoughts. Harvard students engage with each other on this absolutely superficial, vacuous level...
Bryan: ...That's called being a human being...
Dan W: I disagree with the generalizations about the level of interaction. I am a first-year student, and I find that there are students that I engage with on a vacuous level because that's...
Dan B: ...because they're vacuous.
Dan W: ...but you have your friends that you can engage with on a sophisticated level...I think it's there if you look for it.
Kamil: I think there is something in effect called the "coolness paradigm." And unfortunately, at this school, it is something we all agree is totally whack: the Grille. There is a sense of what is cool and what is not cool... I mean,
Adam interrupts Kamil before she gets a chance to get to the point.
Adam: I, I...aahh... I, I, think it is really up to you. A friend told me before I got here, "It sucks to be a freshman, like, you can't meet anyone, no hot girls will talk to you..." And that's absolutely not the experience I had...
Bryan: "I WAS A PLAYAAA!!!"
Arden: I think a lot of us were big time nerds in high school!
Gautam: I was a nerd there and I am a nerd here!
Kamil: Yeah, whenever somebody tells me, "Oh, I was cool in high-school," I tell them "No, you weren't!"
Arden: I know, I mean, "Of course you weren't!" I've been a dork my whole life, and I've never wanted to be anything else. I don't understand this desire to be a bad-ass. There are people who have walked past me, and apparently they are so cool, they don't say hello. I mean, if you say hello, they do not say hello back. And I sort of stand there and say, "What the fuck is going on??"
Dan B: (curtly) They might not like you.
Gautam: (enthusiastically) I think some of the nicest people on campus are the varsity athletes.
Mikey: Except for the occasional homophobia???!!! I think we can make that generalization.
Gautam: My experience with varsity athletes has been, while not uniformly positive, has been...my roommate's on the varsity football team!
Scoffing from around the table.
Dan W: What, were you just surprised because you could never speak to them in high school or...
Erin: That's cruel.
Dan W: No, I'm not saying you were a loser in high school. You already said that yourself.
Hysterical laughter.
Kamil: That is so mean.
Gautam: Athletes don't communicate with campus intellectuals, and we are all campus intellectuals. We don't communicate with each other! I have friends on the football team who...