Burst Your Bubble

On a September morning five years ago, Harvard students huddled around their common room TVs. Their hearts sank with the twin towers, their eyes fixed on the images of carnage, courage, and the war that had just broken out 200 miles away.

For those of us who were in the streets of New York, it looked like the end of the world. But for many Harvard undergrads, it seemed the world outside these gates had just begun to matter. So candles were lit. Blood was given. Meetings were cancelled. Parties were postponed. For once, people went through a kind of reorientation as to what was really important in a day, a semester, a life.

Above all, students were suddenly and acutely conscious that this University is not a world apart but a part of the world and that that world was about to be at war. Five years later, we’re still at war, yet many of us have fallen back into the false comfort of what has been aptly dubbed “the Harvard bubble.” It’s a place where everything of importance is contained within ivy walls, and summed up in the Ec 10 textbook’s definition of self-interest.

Yet the heights of human kindness and the depths of human cowardice seen in this country on Sept. 11—and again in New Orleans just over a year ago—remind us that, when it comes down to it, we’re responsible for each other, and not just for our own ambitions. As students, we have a choice: whether to take on that responsibility or betray it.

The anniversary of Sept. 11 is a good time to contemplate what choice we’ve made, and what choice we intend to make now.

No doubt, many students at Harvard have chosen to engage. Hundreds protested the invasion of Iraq in 2003, because the lives of thousands of Iraqis and young Americans were worth it to them. Some hurled themselves into election campaigns. Others campaigned to call attention to genocide in distant Darfur or to confront injustices closer to home.

But at the end of the day, most of us have returned to our bubbly stupor. We sit back and say, “It’s too bad there’s all that war out there, but as long as I’m in here, it has nothing to do with me.” Do we have to wait until another disaster strikes to realize it has everything to do with us?

Just as terror hit home for all of us on Sept. 11, the “war on terror” and the war in Iraq are now hitting home at Harvard, bubble notwithstanding.

True, the University boasts few students at the front lines of these wars. The poorer kids are being sent to die in our place. But though it may not be a matter of life or death for us, the long arm of war has reached deep inside the ivory tower.

On the home front, military recruiters have been welcomed back on campus, as have secretive security agencies, weapons researchers, and U.S. “nation builders.” In sum, Harvard has gone into the war business, in ways that would have been unimaginable before Sept. 11. On the global front, international students are having a hard time getting visas and crossing borders, while students who want to travel abroad are finding new roadblocks in their way.

And Harvard has not been a stranger to some of the ugliest fallout of the war on terror, as we lose liberties and gain bigotry. Some students can count on the Harvard bubble to shelter them, while others cannot. Assaults on Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians have quadrupled nationwide since Sept. 11, according to the FBI. And that violence has recently reared its head on campus, from last November’s assault on Huma Farid ’06 to an April harassment of an anonymous South Asian student amid a torrent of racial slurs. This violence strikes at the very heart of the freedom and the security essential for any educational institution worthy of its name. And it goes to show how vulnerable this campus really is.

Moreover, the fallout from the war has deprived all of us of the liberty and privacy we once took for granted in the bubble. Now Lamont and Widener are subject to surveillance under the PATRIOT Act. Some student activists are being watched by the Pentagon. And a journalism student recently uncovered “Project Strike Back,” in which the FBI mined hundreds of students’ financial aid records.

Clearly, this is neither the time nor the place for bubbles. Engaged students are finding that college campuses are battlegrounds, not only in the global war on terror, but in the fight for liberty and security at home. We ignore the rest of the world and our responsibility for each other at our own peril.

The fallout from the war raging beyond these walls is right here in our back Yard but so may be the wisdom it will take to end it.

Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. He is a native of New York City.