A Sophomore Parents Weekend

The first-years are initiated, the juniors are seniors and the seniors are retired. By second semester, three-quarters of Harvard College know how it feels to be a sophomore, and the remaining fourth will know soon enough.

Ask any undergraduate which class has the shortest straw. The answer is sure to be the sophomores. From at least reasonable dormitories in Harvard Yard, they have been moved into the unwanted rooms of the housing system—reject rooms of the upper-class lotteries. They are struggling with tutorials in the wrong concentrations, cursing the fifth-class demon of seductive overambition, pass-failing, add-dropping, withdrawing in frustration, and abandoning pre-med for The Study of Religion.

The sophomore class spends a year falling into all the hidden traps and sinkholes of Harvard College, from which first-years are gently steered clear by prefects, concentration advisors, deans and their own prudence or trepidation. Juniors, having somehow managed to extract themselves over the summer, now cautiously avoid these pitfalls of their own accord. The sophomore class spends a year discovering that no one at Harvard College really cares whether they fall.

As soon as all the beginning-of-term commotion settled down in the fall, and the first encrimsoned leaves began to blanket Harvard Yard, proud throngs of first-year parents arrived to spend a weekend in Cambridge. And just as soon as the leaves return, and the grounds crews have had a chance to manicure all the lawns again, Senior Parents will return to Tercentenary Theater. For the moment, seniors are either scrambling to meet thesis deadlines or else coasting through an early retirement, while the juniors enjoy their seniority. And so this weekend, junior parents have been invited to reassure themselves that their investments are secure. They will be received by the House Masters, attend lectures delivered by the Faculty, tour the campus, libraries and museums and be coffeed, lunched, wined, dined and ice-cream-bashed.

But what about the sophomores? Why is there no Sophomore Parents Weekend? What bureaucrat decided that the class that is most in need of a bit of parental love ought to be left out in the cold? Is it just, as usual, that no one cares enough to think about the sophomores? Or is the administration afraid of what parents would find if they did visit during sophomore year?

Truth be told, the administration has little to fear. Everyone recognizes parents weekends for what they are: elaborate excuses for Harvard to spend 48 hours engaged in its favorite pastime. And yet, however many yards of red carpet the College manages to roll out, the greatest burden of showing off inevitably falls to the students. What, then, could happen on Sophomore Parents Weekend? Only the most faithless can believe that sophomores would not rise to the occasion. Having a full year more experience than the first-years, sophomores have at least as much to show for themselves; being a class that continually strives to validate itself, sophomores might make up through passion the advantage that falls to juniors by default. What could happen to the sophomores after spending the weekend with their parents, exhibiting the exceptional talents of their roommates and friends, attending lectures by the most entertaining professors, tasting the night life around Boston and Cambridge, and continually nodding in agreement to the assertion that “Harvard really is the quintessential college experience”? They might start to believe it all themselves, again, and brighten up about sophomore year.

For the time being, though, in the realm of parents’ weekends as in so many other ways, the College has turned its back on the sophomore class. The most for which we can ask is a modicum of sympathy from the other classes. Well then, juniors, before you leave your parents for the library or the liquor store this weekend, consider first asking them to adopt an orphaned sophomore for the evening. The kindness might be appreciated more than you would care to remember.

Benjamin I. Rapoport ’03 is a physics and mathematics concentrator in Lowell House.