A Tradition to Be Cherished

This weekend, most of the campus observed the biennial tradition of journeying down to Yale for The Game. Bedecked in Crimson regalia and perhaps even tipsy from preemptive victory celebrations, students packed into shuttles for the tortuous trip down the Turnpike and Interstate 91 to New Haven, eagerly anticipating the pomp and circumstance that is our proudest piece of Harvard mythology.

But here at Harvard, which has long prided itself on piercing the fog of the unenlightened past, this 124-year tradition maintains only a tenuous grasp on our collective imagination. While we certainly pay it lip service—even competing to outdo one another in antipathy toward Yale—the substance of the rivalry has long since eroded. For most, Harvard-Yale has become another mere excuse for collegiate revelry, which even the local authorities have recently conspired to expunge.

From “pre-frosh” weekend, presumptive Harvard students are nursed on bile toward Yale. Echoes of the rivalry reverberate in orientation sessions and programs during early September’s Freshmen Week. By the opening kickoff of the football season a few weeks later, the newest class at Harvard has become proudly aware of its identity not only with the red-brick, ivy-clad walls they will call home, but also with a long and storied tradition extending back into time as immemorial as it gets on this side of the Atlantic.

But this exuberance, this pride, this community disappears suddenly as the exceedingly ambitious, driven, and self-motivated freshmen get absorbed in their studies, banal extracurricular pursuits, and the demands of quotidian life. For the remainder of the undergraduate tenure, Harvard pride makes a triumphant re-entry only four succeeding times: each year on the weekend before Thanksgiving. For the rest of the time, Harvard students are sometimes critical of, often self-deprecating about, but mostly oblivious to their college’s rich past.

We should not be surprised by such ambivalence. Tradition is a dangerous word in progressive circles like this University. Especially at Harvard, tradition connotes racism, sexism, and elitism—oak-paneled back rooms filled with the heavy bouquet of brandy and thick swirls of cigar smoke, and other such ghastly images.

Any of the poor audience members at President Drew G. Faust’s installation ceremony, drenched by downpour—auguring perhaps the Heavens’ displeasure with the proceedings—and subjected to all the platitudinous ennui, could observe the new administration’s explicit hostility to tradition. Our Puritan founders, though bigots themselves, were thrust into stocks by the likes of President Faust and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann ’71and pilloried for their apparent prejudice against women’s liberation and atheism—the two talismans of the nascent Faust era.

A short survey of recent adjustments to college life should suffice: in-suite fireplaces sealed up, the House lottery completely randomized, and an unspoken tolerance of underage drinking imperiously overridden. Even these more trivial, yet preciously guarded, traditions of Harvard life have garnered the wrath of the postmodern social engineers who run this University.

Every institution, and especially one that fosters such life-long connections as a university, needs tradition. The memory of the past and the examples of those gone before serve as the social glue that tie together often disparate elements of a community and direct them toward a common purpose. Harvard’s commitment to excellence or pursuit of truth—one can claim—should be that glue, and not a nostalgic deifying of the past. But past experience speaks more loudly than promises for the future: A tradition of excellence, by virtue of its longevity, rightly sounds more impressive than just excellence itself.

Tradition likewise demands respect for the past, that we only with the greatest care appraise its apparent mistakes. But at Harvard, where innovation is king and eyes are fixed on the future, such respect is lacking. No wonder that the Harvard-Yale patriotism appears so hollow and artificial.

Like all history, Harvard’s is far from spotless. Yet four centuries of existence, endurance, and effective prosperity certainly speak highly in its favor. The memory of great men—and recently, women too—who have come before us, whether presidents, renowned scholars, or the captains of Harvard’s seven national-championship football teams, should inspire not only a sense of pride but a sense of duty. We have succeeded to a rich inheritance and thus are responsible for a sacred trust, for the work assembled over generations—one that we should hope to transmit not only intact but even more abundant to the next era of Harvard students.

Yet today there is no sense of that responsibility left to students. As the Admissions Office continues to knock down barriers for previously disadvantaged demographics, the emphasis is on merit. Accordingly, with each assuming he deserves his spot by his own merit, Harvard students no longer tend to see themselves as partaking in a grand tradition. We all enter the ivy gates interested primarily in those lofty heights to which our diplomas will propel us. And individual tastes and whims—whether academic, extracurricular, or social—are given priority. Harvard school spirit and pride get only what remains, which typically amounts to one weekend in November, spent mostly in a beer-induced haze.

Harvard-Yale is a grand and rightly celebrated tradition, even with its attendant, although equally-cherished, excesses. Such a shame, though, that merely a weekend each year is the only time when most students will bother to acknowledge their place in the long line of Harvard history.

Founded in 1636, our University abounds with history and tradition. We ought not allow the ascendant academic prejudices to rob us of this patrimony.



Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a history concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.