Through the Looking Glass

The long, cold, late morning walk across the Yard is a part of the semi-conscious weekend routine for a great many Harvard undergraduates. This last weekend, though, it was different. It was shorter. It was more private. It didn’t ruin a single photo of the John Harvard statue. Something was missing from Harvard Yard on regatta weekend: tourists.

With entry to the epicentre of America’s oldest college restricted to Harvard ID-holders and their guests, the tour groups that regularly block pathways and gawk at students on their way to classes were nowhere to be seen. With the exception of clusters of eager would-be Harvard parents and their children, there were no massive groups of camera-toting intruders taking pictures of real-life-honest-to-goodness Harvard students or naïvely rubbing our benefactor’s foot for good luck.

Few students come to Harvard with the intention or even the knowledge of learning in (and being) one of the biggest tourist draws in New England. If the wall of tour buses that lines Massachusetts Avenue on any given Sunday is not enough of an indication of this place’s appeal, one needs only to browse the Boston/Cambridge page on Yahoo!Travel: Harvard is listed as the number-one thing to see in Cambridge. It is also listed under the ‘Castles and Palaces’ category: clearly, not enough Universities make the pages of Yahoo! to merit a dedicated designation. Harvard does make the cut, mostly because it is incredibly famous.

The fame and renown of this university is hardly confined to the travel pages of web portals: just ask anyone from Harvard, Massachusetts. Or Harvard, Arkansas. Or California. Or Floriada, Idaho, Ilinois, Iowa, or Maryland: there are municipalities named Harvard in eleven states. That doesn’t include Colorado’s Mount Harvard, or the Harvard Glacier in Alaska. The Harvard name appears throughout the history of the United States, and recurs in newspaper headlines with unrivalled frequency. In the past six months, the Harvard name has appeared in roughly two-and-a-half times as many newspaper headlines as that of rival Yale, and nearly five times more than Princeton’s moniker. In a 2003 Gallup poll, more than twice as many Americans thought that Harvard was the nation’s best college as thought the same of Stanford and Yale, the next highest schools. Whether or not this reputation is deserved, it is next to impossible to live in this country and never encounter Harvard, in name or reputation.

To appreciate the privilege and prestige inherent in attending this university, spend extra time on the way to class stopping to avoid interfering with pictures taken in front of University Hall, be distracted by the camera flashes in your peripheral vision as you try to stay awake through a lecture in Sanders Theatre, hear the tourists bargaining with security at the entrance to Widener Library, stare back at the passers-by looking through the open curtains of your suite, or watch as the staff at Annenberg sprints to the hall’s entrance to intercept disobedient and/or ignorant tourists intent on taking pictures of that sacred space. As Harvard students, we go to school in a tourist attraction and as such have a day-to-day college dynamic just a little different than we would anywhere else.

It just would have been kind of nice to know about that in advance.

Adam Goldenberg ‘08, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Grays Hall.