Don’t Diss What Nourishes You

Corporate recruiting is as maligned as it is observed. An upperclassman’s autumn is now well underway and that means a gale of jackets and ties for recruiting events. Yet ask people why they’re dressed in their Sunday best, and what you will get is a curious hesitance. It’s a little like interrogating a guilty child; you have to coax the answer out patiently.

First comes the shy admission—“I’m attending a recruiting event”—invariably followed by a shuffling of the feet. Then arrives the reticent grin, and finally a laugh, usually too loud. After that, the inevitable attempt at penance:

a) Guilty-as-Charged: the person has sold his/her soul to the devil, and knows it.

b) Seeking Future Redemption: The person is only doing this to jumpstart his/her career. After three years, he/she will work for a teary-eyed NGO to aid the starving children of Kirblakastan (and world peace, of course).

c) Knee-deep in Denial: The person is going through with the process not because he/she is really planning to work for a consulting firm, but just to “keep options open.”

All this caution is understandable because corporate recruiting is, of course, evil. We students, who have attempted to live viruously all our lives, are embarrassed to be tempted by the prospect of a comfortable life instead of one devoted to Humanity (with a capital H) and the Greater Common Good (again, with capitals).

Actually, it is rather hypocritical that students here feel superior to the idea of recruiting. Harvard has always attempted to exemplify the ideals of a society at a given period and recruiting is just another expression of this. We are, after all, not the University of Chicago, who have defined excellence as academic achievement and correspondingly produced intellectuals, regardless of society’s valuation for them. Harvard is instead in the business of producing heroes, living ideals of society’s idea of excellence. Were American society to idealize bookish grad students, Harvard would churn them out in droves. Instead, we like our grads competitive, young, and wealthy. And so, where corporate recruiting caters to this societal idealization, Harvard fulfills it, because that is what Harvard does.

And lest one naively think, “I can be different. I do not fit this Harvard mold,” I would have to correct you. Think of how you got here. You did well in school, because that was what one was supposed to do. You played a musical instrument, because your parents inculcated that ability as a symbol of excellence. You ran for leadership positions because your teachers encouraged you to do so. (Of course there are some genuinely brilliant kids who have developed their talents without such constant prodding, but they fall few and far in between.)

What I am suggesting is that the majority of Harvard’s organization kids believe in excellence, but not much else. We have taken on the standards of other people not because we found them good and noble, but because we profited for them.

This is why we cannot see recruiting as beneath us. There is no consistency in claiming superiority to a system from which one was derived and indeed from which one still reaps benefits. That would be hypocrisy, and you certainly can’t run the world with that kind of reputation.



Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.