Abroad Thoughts, From Home

“Who are these people?” we asked each other when we returned from intersession and saw the new faces crowding dining hall. “Where did they come from?”

They came, it turned out, from abroad—from semesters spent in Europe or South America or Asia. We could find their pictures, captioned “LOA,” in the house facebook. The returning students had changed from the pictures we identified them by. The they’d cut their hair, or exuded a new, vaguely Continental languor, or had become raconteurs. In their absence, we had bought books at the Coop and trudged up Garden Street to the Quad and had slept through lectures in Sever or Emerson—had done, in short, the same things Harvard students have been doing for generations. They hadn’t. It marked them.

Thanks to relaxed Core requirements and administrators’ encouragement, the number of students thus marked rose sharply this year—93, according to a Sept. 17 Crimson article, compared to last year’s 51. This is, most of us agree, a positive trend. We all talk about being trapped in the Harvard bubble, but until lately few of us had done anything about it. How better to gain perspective on Harvard than by spending one’s junior year in, say, Buenos Aires? When we call my once and future roommate, who has adopted this course, the very key and tempo of Argentine telephone rings seems exotic. A continent away, my roommate tells us about the junior year she is spending far from the Yard—plentiful steak! Cheap cigarettes! The tango! It’s summer now in Argentina, and she tells us she misses the snow. We don’t believe her for a minute.

We miss her. In schools where more students study abroad, we would not, perhaps, feel her absence so sharply. Here, though, it seems crippling; in conversation we are missing a doubles partner. I don’t think that it is study abroad’s relative unpopularity alone that accounts for our feeling so bereft. More than elsewhere, absence feels wrong here. What we love about Harvard—and what sometimes frustrates us about it—is its immutability. Mass Hall has outlived generations of occupants; passing its stolid red brick on our way to class, we know it will anchor the Yard long after we’ve stopped sending checks to the development office. Commencement, baroque with its Latin and with its officials on horseback, exudes venerability; Harvard planners think in terms of decades and centuries as they limn the details of the Allston expansion. Despite the Undergraduate Council’s best efforts, it will be a generation before Harvard students enjoy a student center or a substantially better gym.

And we’ve internalized and miniaturized this sense of history: many blocking groups, for instance, comprise amended freshman rooming groups; allegiances to extracurricular activities and friends endure, largely unchanged, over the course of many Harvard careers. It is in this context that study abroad feels so unnatural. Harvard hasn’t changed much over centuries. Why should our Harvard change so dramatically over the course of a semester? “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;/ Nought may endure but Mutability;” Shelley proclaims gloomily at the end of “Mutability.” I had long considered Harvard the exception that proved the couplet. Study abroad creates a flux in a place that has long repulsed it.

Over intersession, one of my roommates flew to Buenos Aires to visit our temporary Argentine. My roommate said that the city was wonderful–“It’s like a combination of Mexico City and Paris”—and that our absent roommate was happy there. In the pictures my roommate brought back she looks happy. The tilt of her head is more coquettish than I remember, the cut of her clothes more sophisticated, her hair glossier, curlier. Because the pictures are a little overexposed, her smiles are undifferentiated bright crescents. On the telephone, after the string of foreign rings have elapsed, our absent roommate tells us she’ll be ready to come back next September, that she’ll appreciate Harvard more then. There is some comfort in knowing that the Harvard she’ll return to in September as a senior is nearly indistinguishable from the one she came to in the September of her freshman year. Although her absence has changed our Harvard, it hasn’t changed Harvard. And ultimately, this may be the change wrought by study abroad: a transformed definition of the Harvard experience instead of a transformed Harvard. For future generations of college students, tango lessons may seem as quintessentially collegiate as Tercentenary Theatre.

Phoebe Kosman ’04 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.