Internationalism Everywhere

Several weeks ago, I found myself in the company of Mukesh “Mark” Mehta while on Christmas Break in Montana. Mark’s Great Falls home—he has one in Bombay, too—is a labyrinthine world wherein the twains of Bollywood and the American West meet. There is the print of Charlie Russell’s “Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flatheads” in one corner—a coming-together between “Indian-Feather and Indian-Dot,” Marks notes gleefully while pointing to his forehead. And in another corner, we find the intimately decorated, framed pages from some Mumbai bookseller.

I eye the illuminated leafs of the manuscript at a distance, crack my knuckles, revel in my cunning, flash a little smirk. I know a little something about Islamic decorative arts in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Thanks are owed to Harvard College, and particularly to its Core Curriculum, which, in case you were confused, is the “general education” complement to our departmental “concentrations.” In Harvard’s words, the Core is “an attempt to say what it means to be broadly educated.”

So that we might be broadly educated, 50 others and I took, in Spring 2004, “Literature and Arts B-35. The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent: Art, Architecture, and Ceremonial at the Ottoman Court.” Which, you can say to your prospective employer during a job interview, is about way more than the Magnificent sultan himself. There’s an entire week of comparison to the Timurid dynasty and the Safavid, and Mughal empires.

Standing before Mukesh Mehta’s household adornments (in Montana, mind you, on the cusp of 2006), I gesture to the telltale gold-fringed palanquin and the turbaned figure of the emperor. I note how he is enveloped by a halo. A Mughal durbar, I tell Mukesh. Maybe Jahangir. Perhaps Akbar. But certainly not Aurangzeb—he didn’t go for this artsy-fartsy stuff at all.

Mark marveled and wanted to know how I’d learned this.

“Why, Mukesh, every Harvard student would know that,” I said.

Well, that’s not true. But Harvard students are masters of obscurantism—insofar as we can bring “Basho” to Kansas, or “Dinosaurs” to Manhattan, or for that matter “Suleyman” to Montana.

All of this—thanks to the Core.

On January 23, I will quietly finish my studies at Harvard College after completing a morning exam in “Counting People” to belatedly fulfill my Quantitative Reasoning requirement.

I’m still waiting to meet even a single Harvard student who likes the Core Curriculum. No doubt it will go unlamented once its long-anticipated, continuously-postponed repeal is finally accomplished. And then, the student body will let up some great declaration of “huh…whatever” to inaugurate the Core’s reincarnat…I mean, its replacement.

I suppose I never did value the Core. And I’m sure not about to right now. Yet, gradually, I’ve found myself brainwashed. Not by an illusion of the Core’s relevance—certainly not.

Rather, I have slowly succumbed to the absurd lens it has imposed on my day-to-day existence.

Consider the college’s present-day recipe for a student’s matriculation into “the company of educated men and women.”

First, Harvard plops its wards down to live for four years amongst the student body’s extraordinary miscegenation of peoples, places, and histories. Not really an accurate canvas of human diversity in any particular place except the Ivy League campus itself, the student body is more an unwieldy chimera manufactured to the specifications of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” attraction. (Which, incidentally, the theme park’s planners have tellingly relegated to an area of the park called “Fantasy Land.”)

Then add to a Harvard student life the Harvard Faculty, those souls who’ve spent their lives in this wildly diverse environment. For 30-odd years, young learners have been fed into the Core Curriculum’s crucible of randomness. Though for the Faculty, this is real, damn it, and not some merely contrived artifice. And now, by way of these professors’ new Curricular Review, comes the watchword “internationalization.” (The professoriate might as well giddily exclaim, “Radicalize the Revolution!”)

Rules are rules, and however much College students despise the Core (and will probably come to despise its successor), they also must cope with it. Only the most brazen, worldly-wise student, at ease with casting his GPA to the wind, will remain obdurate to the Core’s nefarious invitation to partake of novel “global perspectives”—generously complimented by a course’s tinge of academic ease.

If you were once a 10-year-old paper delivery boy from Montana who thought Teddy Roosevelt was pretty neat—my own precious contribution, I suppose, to this carnival of diversity—a Harvard College education leaves you feeling like an absurd rendering of Captain Richard Francis Burton, an out-of-place explorer in a land full of marvelous and bizarre distractions.

For these formative years of education, our reality is the absurd, the peripheral, the world heretofore gone unseen.

This pervasive Core mentality has warped even how I view my hometown, the most intimate and unassuming of places. Now, Montana has been enlivened by a schizophrenic dramatis personae.

There’s Mukesh’s son, Sahil, speaking Gujarati on the phone to his grandfather, a Congress Party bigwig.

Or Max Wibaux, the young man I met at a Harvard Model Congress Europe session in Paris, whose great-grandfather Pierre ranched in Dakota Territory and for whom Wibaux County in Eastern Montana is named.

Or the lonely Kurd, exultant in the local paper after Saddam is hanged. Or the local mobster of Kazakh extraction. Or the Nepalese bureaucrat on a city government exchange program, whose father’s untimely death necessitated the retrieval of warm bull’s urine for mourning rites.

I was once too cynical to think an undergraduate education would change me at all. I was wrong, for a transformation has taken place. My education—including what I took to be obscure and trivial accoutrements—has subtly made me into a citizen of the world. Such a fellow may well be more an oddity in Montana, but he’s surely relevant elsewhere. Right? Maybe? Dean Gross?

Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears regularly.