I Hate Being Wrong

I hate being wrong. No, really, I despise it. Ask anyone who knows me and they’re likely to chuckle knowingly and quickly agree. Even when I’m totally wrong, I’m not wrong, if you know what I mean.

It’s important that you know this about me.

The first draft of this column was great. It was a broad critique of the Institute of Politics (IOP) as an organization that, too often, is a place for political ambition instead of political ideals and inspiration. It was pointed and angry and, best of all, it had that “stick it to the man” quality that is oh so satisfying.

The IOP is, I declared, “a place for those who are already empowered to play internal political games and make good connections for the future of their political careers. The result is that those who are highly involved…tend to be rich, white and mainstream.” Sounds good, right? Provocative and progressive with a dash of the self-righteous.

But a few weeks ago, as I sat eating the last piece of pizza at the IOP open house, I looked around at the crowd. These are good people, I thought. They seem happy, they like each other, they’re passionate about what they do, and at least 90 percent of them seem almost too earnest in their desire to change the world for the better. Some of these people are my best friends. Why can’t I differentiate my criticism of the Institute from a criticism of them?

For the uninitiated: the IOP’s programming is a result of a strange coordination between the Institute’s paid staff and the Student Advisory Committee (SAC), about 40 Harvard undergrads. Working with money and space left as a memorial to President Kennedy, the Institute offers speaker forums, study groups led by renowned political minds, policy groups and more. It’s one of the only places in the world where college kids can regularly interact with the political elite, gaining skills, experiences and, yes, connections that might allow us to someday join them.

So the reason it irked me that the IOP at least appears to be so overwhelmingly “rich, white, and mainstream” is that it seemed to me to be yet another way in which our supposedly meritocratic school helped perpetuate a rich, white, mainstream elite instead of developing a meritocratic one blind to previous privilege. After all, according to best estimates based on rampant facebooking, only six out of the 42 members of SAC are not white (and only 15 are women). And, based on admittedly unscientific observation alone, SAC is filled with polo shirts and blazers.

These people then, these preppy white kids, were a part of the problem. But they seem so nice, I thought. Why was I having such a hard time reconciling what they represented to me with what they really were: earnest, idealistic, hard-working.

I guess it’s natural. When we believe something is imperfect or unjust, we implicitly blame people who are a part of it. Suddenly their preppiness transforms itself into a horrible moral fault and they aren’t just preppy—they’re callous and ambitious, cynical and manipulative. In my twisted logic and progressive fervor they become little Nixons instead of the hard-working, idealistic people they are.

While it grapples with the more difficult and complicated questions that prevent the IOP from fulfilling its campus-wide mission, SAC would do itself a service to remind people like me of how unfair and unrepresentative this stereotype is. That step, if combined with the already underway processes of outreach and structural reform, would go a long way to reminding the campus that politics should be and is a place for those who see the possibilities of a better world and want others to see them too.

While the IOP works internally to combat this stereotype and address the broader structural problems it faces, the rest of us should consider to what extent we prevent ourselves from experiences, whether at the IOP or with any other community on campus, because we’re unable to step past our own faulty assumptions. What we might find is that, in addition to other pressures and trends, our stereotypes reinforce themselves and prevent us from enjoying many of the most important resources Harvard has to offer. They likely contribute to their very problem we’re critical of.

Being wrong sucks. But not just because you might have to admit to it, but because it might make your life a little less interesting. Here’s to hoping that, for me anyway, it doesn’t happen again.

Andrew Golis ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.