Moving Beyond 'The Three Lies'

Here’s an idea for the Crimson Key as they lead herds of prospective students on the campus tour this fall: Tell them everything about Harvard, down to the grittiest, most ugly detail. Certainly this would make the tour informative, but the Crimson Key would also weed out the most dreamy-eyed of applicants, who later become the students cantankerously wondering why the world’s richest university doesn’t serve them breakfast in bed.

While a lot of nonchalant high school seniors can count on their aggressive parents to ask the right questions, e.g., “Is there breakfast in bed?”, some are braving the application process alone. The history lecture that these lone warriors get on the campus tour, with its wild tales of cannonballs denting the bricks in Harvard Yard, is not exposing them to the reality of student life.

I, for one, still remember my first tour of Harvard. The guide sounded scripted and did not have much to say about campus life at all, at least not about campus life in this century. If I had not come armed with the questions every tour guide really hates to be asked, I would have ended up with a fascinating but thoroughly useless Harvard history lesson.

While the tragic saga of Harry Elkins Widener makes for a great story, maybe the tour should address why his library closes long before most Harvard students even think about cracking open the books for an evening of studying. And though the Crimson Key might talk briefly about the Core Curriculum, they leave applicants unprepared for the horrifying discovery of having to sit through eight pointless classes that have nothing even remotely to do with their real academic interests.

The tour guide then attempts to assuage the usual fears that most first-years end up in large, impersonal lecture classes. Forced to admit that these fears are well-founded, the Crimson Key tries to rationalize with ridiculous assertions that teaching fellows are just as good. Erroneously, they suggest that you and your 800 classmates can still have personal contact with those very same professors who commissioned an army of TFs and section leaders to get you out of their hair.

So historic yarns and exaggerations aside, we have the opportunity to use a mundane campus tour for something truly valuable—answering the puzzled applicant’s most profound questions about contemporary campus and academic life. What Advanced Placement test scores count towards Advanced Standing? What kind of support networks and academic advising programs exist for struggling first-years? What are meals like at Annenberg?

If the Harvard tour allowed applicants so much as a glimpse of dorm life or some semblance of understanding of the Core Curriculum, the Crimson Key could distinguish itself as a truly helpful resource for students struggling through a difficult admissions process. The Ivies these days have become notoriously inaccessible to the applicant who wants to get beyond student-teacher ratios and other amorphous percentages. We should set an example of openness, even if our Ivy League counterparts don’t join us in the effort.

As it is, Harvard relies on a historical mystique rather than its diverse academic and social atmosphere to attract undergraduate applicants. Maybe this is because the Crimson Key is giving the same tour to prospective students that it would give to curious old ladies passing through Cambridge. Why not have two tours—one to wow the weekend tourists, and another to give applicants meaningful information about the school?

We need students who understand the realities of life at Harvard, not those simply awed by the legends of Holworthy Hall. The realities of Harvard life are clearly not coming across in the cursory campus visit, and certainly not on the historic tour.