The Tragedy of Indifference

The student body, it appears, will willingly grant the University administration tyrannical authority—so long as it agrees to give us a 24-hour library and a student pub. The University Council’s (UC) recent decision to support Harvard’s custodial workers in their wage negotiations with the University has drawn an irate and indignant response from several student organizations claiming that the council has transgressed its mandate by addressing a political issue. This issue, however, is one in which the student body should expect, even demand, that the UC involve itself.

The UC’s constitution begins, “We, the undergraduates of Harvard College, are an important part of the University community, and are therefore entitled to an active role in deciding its policies and priorities.” The UC was created, and continues to exist, not merely in order to coordinate student life and beg favors from the leviathan administration and its $25.9 billion endowment. It exists, as an extension of the will of the students, to contribute to the formation of University policy. That includes University policy towards its custodians.

As students, we must remember that we form a critical element of the University. Without us, it would just be Harvard Research Institute. This status grants us both the power and responsibility to actively influence University policies, namely through the action of the UC. The administration does not, and cannot, exist independently of us. If this sounds revolutionary, it is only because we have grown too passively indifferent to our own community.

The UC’s vote on the custodians’ contract negotiations has been likened to its resolutions on issues of international politics, with opponents of these resolutions calling for the UC to abstain from all political issues. Regardless of the UC’s actual influence in either of these matters, the conflation of University policy and international human rights concerns into the single term “politics” reveals a disturbing underlying attitude of indifference and resignation. It suggests that University President Lawrence H. Summers is as autonomous of student opinion as is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. This seems an absurd correlation—but if the students’ will is not meaningfully expressed through the organized leadership of the UC, it exerts influence over nothing.

Condemning the UC’s vote has implications far beyond the single issue of janitor’s wages. It reinforces and amplifies what is perhaps the single greatest flaw in the Harvard community: it has become oxymoronic to speak of a “Harvard community” as inclusive of students, faculty, and administration. Whatever issues are facing Harvard’s fragmented student life, there is an undeniable sense of alienation between the students and that strange foreign power known as the University. But the University is only a foreign power to the extent that we perceive it as such.

This is not a call to revolution, nor even a plea for custodians’ rights, but rather an exhortation to awareness. We are, as students, members of a highly interdependent community. If it is dysfunctional, that is only because we have turned away from it. Building a student pub will not create a sense of social interaction which did not exist before; more popular bands will not turn concerts into spectacular successes. No number of petitions passed around will make students genuinely care about University policy towards custodians. Only through a fundamental shift in attitude on the part of the collective student body can any of these changes occur.

I transferred to Harvard from another university, and I have often been asked what is different about Harvard. Aside from the awe-inspiring resources of the University, there are many similarities. Students here are exceedingly bright and generally interesting, but there are plenty of interesting students elsewhere. Faculty here are competent and courses rigorous, but Harvard is by no means unique in that respect either.

No, Harvard is defined and distinguished by the unique attitude and mindset of its students. Elsewhere, college lasts four years and is followed by an indefinite and unappealing period known as “real life.” Here, college is perceived as the first step into real life. Students believe what they are doing now will matter in the future and that they are building their careers. In many cases, this is not an inaccurate belief.

The cost of this attitude, however, is something we all perceive: the loss of community. Rather than being engaged in a four-year utopian community, students simultaneously look inward, towards studies and the necessity of personal academic achievement, and forward, towards the prosperous futures ensured by that achievement. Consequently, Harvard ceases to function as a socially interactive organism and fragments into individuals and groups of students united by similar ambitions. The immediate moment, these few years of youth, recede into the background. Saturday-night parties and University policy become matters of relative indifference, for better or for worse.

This is by no means an invective against Harvard, but an explanatory response to its critics. The solution to these complaints is simple, though hardly easy. As a student body, we must collectively change our attitude towards life here. I hardly advocate for a disregard for academics, but rather a renewed interest in Harvard as a community and an investment in these four years as valuable for their own sake, not merely as the start of a career.

This is not an ideal wish: it is the necessary precondition of any reform.



James P. Maguire ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House.