Harvard: Resting on Laurels?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a competent employer must be in want of a Harvard student. But inside that 400-year-old veneer built by the accomplishments of Harvard alumni, cracks exist—cracks that have recently gained international media scrutiny. Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 allegedly plagiarized passages in her bestselling novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life”; Nick B. Sylvester ’04 falsified aspects of a Village Voice article, “Do You Wanna Kiss Me?”; Eugene M. Plotkin ’00 was indicted for a $6.2 million insider trading fiasco at Goldman Sachs.

These scandals, and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ ousting of President Lawrence H. Summers, have made 2006 a nightmarish year for Harvard’s public relations. Yet, inevitably, 20,000 over-achieving high school seniors will try to climb into our Ivy Tower next winter, U.S. World & News Report’s ritual crowning of Harvard will stabilize our jolted foundations, and most of our graduating class will exit Johnston Gate with promising jobs.

For Harvard is Harvard: the most famous college in the world. When my brother and I met a beautiful Italian waitress in Florence who barely spoke English, she asked where we studied. “Princeton,” he said; she simply shrugged her shoulders. “Harvard,” I replied, and in a flash, her eyes lit up with excitement. “Harvard?! Amazing.”

It is amazing—in a perverted and peculiar sense. We 6,600 students are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of collegians around the world, and yet we (along with our professors, our campus, and our endowment) epitomize elite, higher education in the minds of millions. So when the local, national, or international media uncovers a “bad” egg among us, one question undoubtedly pops out: does Harvard deserve such an exalted reputation?

The answer to that question essentially depends on how one defines “college.” In the interest of space and time, I will stick to two very different but applicable definitions: a) college is an academic experience, or b) college is a pre-professional experience.

For decades, Harvard students have complained that the College does not fulfill the former expectation. From ignorant Teaching Fellows to inaccessible professors to a dysfunctional curriculum, classroom complaints from students are well-documented and well-publicized. Often these claims are unfounded or exaggerated, but the important fact is that they—despite their abundance—have had no noticeable effect on the outside world’s perception of Harvard’s polished veneer.

Why then, do the best and the brightest continue to flock to Harvard? Some come for a specific scientist, others come for the squash team, but most, I wager, come for the fulfillment of definition “b”: a network and a job.

In all of Harvard’s history, these two aspects of the “Harvard experience” have blossomed in a symbiotic, cyclic relationship; students mix with their exemplary peers, who benefit in their professional life from their Harvard connections, which in turn elevates Harvard’s reputation yet again.

Eventually, however, that reputation can become divorced from reality. We Harvardians love to think that our inordinate success with “b” depends mainly on our own skills. We are the ones who scored 1600 on our SATs or mastered the oboe underwater. We ascribe our progress towards the United States Congress or the presidency of Citigroup as a reflection of our merit; we view our achievements as a statement that we belong among our forefathers, such as John F. Kennedy ’40, John Updike ’54, or Senator Al Gore ’69.

But it is exactly that tradition of success that should limit our hubristic interpretation of our accomplishments. Our alumni have made a lasting impression on the world, and we students benefit immensely from that history. We might think that we are smarter and more ambitious and more important than students at UC Berkeley or Illinois State, and that is why we are the ones featured on the cover of the U.S.A. Today Life Section or in the Village Voice. Much of the credit for those achievements, however, must be attributed to the advantages bestowed upon us by our golden ticket sent from Byerly Hall.

As the world has seen with these recent scandals, we who have received the benefits of admittance to the Ivy Tower are not necessarily worthy of the special treatment or praise that parents, employers, and media outlets quickly assign to us Cantabrigians. I will not shotgun my own foot and write that Harvard students should not be trusted; that would be an unfair and untrue generalization. Nevertheless, I sincerely worry that Harvard’s current veneer—our superior reputation—is maintained more by prestige than by substance. Only time, and the frequency of scandal, will tell.



Andrew D. Fine ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Stoughton Hall.