Harry Lewis and the News

Monday evening brought good news in the form of a personal e-mail from one Harry R. Lewis (bcarroll@fas.harvard.edu) that reads as follows: “Dear Madeleine, I write to encourage you...” Well, I needn’t quote the rest of it. He was writing to alert me to a special privilege I have as an enrolled Harvard College student: the “unique opportunity” to take an online survey, which upon completion will enter me into a random contest for all sorts of neat prizes, like meal tickets and “items with Harvard insignia, etc.”

I wonder what is implied by that “etc.” Deanships, maybe? That’s some pretty strong incentivizing. Now, I know from experience that online surveys are mostly about getting your e-mail address. But Harry R. Lewis already has my e-mail address. What does he want with me? I go to the link given in his e-mail, and a page pops up that reads “Welcome Madeleine Elfenbein,” and in smaller letters, “If you are not Madeleine Elfenbein, please click here.” Just to be difficult, I clicked there, thinking I might be redirected to the Harvard admissions webpage. Instead the page asks me my e-mail address again and offers to resend the survey invitation. So I decided to take the survey.

The questions are all about how I spend my time, what my classes are like and how college has changed me. There’s one question the survey at many points alludes to, but is found nowhere in so many words: Are you happy in college?

They don’t ask us because they don’t dare. I read in a recent op-ed in these pages that 9.5 percent of students here have considered suicide, and 45 percent have suffered major depression. Like much of America, and like students at our “peer institutions,” Harvard students are sad. It is bizarre that the context of these revelations was an article calling for the expansion of athletic facilities, based upon studies linking physical health to mental health. That may be true, and there’s no doubt that an improved MAC would make a lot of people happy. But there’s no easy fix for institution-wide misery.

The material life of a college student is arguably as free of want as could be. And not by chance, either. Our comfort is dearly bought at tens of thousands of dollars per semester: the cost of lodging us in Georgian-revival buildings with working fireplaces, feeding us with the best that institutional cuisine has to offer, wiring us to the Web from anywhere on campus and putting a host of expensively-trained minds at our service. We live within walking distance of the largest university book collection in the world, and like kings we entertain celebrities, heroes and despots. Our campus life is designed to be perfect, and it really ought to be.

Yet how many of us wake up in the night to the scratching of ambitions underneath the floorboards and in the radiators, and the rattlings of pipe dreams struggling to get out? Who put these monsters there to trouble our sleep? Some were abandoned by former residents out of forgetfulness or spite; the others are ours and were stuck there outside the bounds of space and time to allow us to focus on present exigencies. Excluded from our plans and schemes, they subsist of their own will and take on malignant proportions. Only a superbly efficient soul can repress the symptoms completely. The rest of us will never be free of the varmints.

After a prodigal semester spent outside Harvard and its dizzying loop of distractions, I wanted dearly to belong again. At first I was afraid it wouldn’t take me back. Upon arriving here and presenting myself at the superintendent’s desk, I was thankful to receive the Harvard sacrament: an ID card with my freshman photo and name freshly embossed on it. Now the coveted status is mine again, and with it access to all that makes a Harvard life perky: dining halls, libraries, Quincy House, Crimson Cash.

Alas, my rebirth as a Harvard student is not a return to innocence. I am not strong enough to resist the collective obsession with professional unfulfillment. So I join the rest and plan anxiously for a joyless, indeterminate future.

This is a lot to lay on Harry R. Lewis. Here, let me try and be a sport about it. Harry, I want my college life to be like it was 50 years ago, before even you were a student here. I imagine the Adams House Library on a Friday evening, the room smoky and full of young men clutching cloth-bound books and fountain pens poised to scribble notes in the margins. Their mental paths were circuitous and paved with discarded ideas. Or they were sipping brandy out of monogrammed flasks concealed in their blazers and debating whether to go carouse. Not that student life was better, but I suspect it was less two-faced; these boys knew what they were about. Whereas we feel grateful and overawed (or resentful, but still overawed), they felt comfortable because the place was made for them.

Next time Harry R. Lewis writes to encourage me, I have half a mind to write back and tell him about the rattlings and my own vague unease, which I expect to persist in the face of whatever institutional changes are in the works. In any case, they are likely to be small ones, since Harvard doesn’t change easily, and it doesn’t change much. Yet some things are bound to change: modern students are the great 20th century innovation, at once the product and the customer. If this is the case, I wonder what our half-lives are and when we’re due to expire.

Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.