Just Say ‘No’ to NYC?

Harvard is a coaling station somewhere between Manhattan and its vast hinterland. Look around the dining hall this morning—you’ll see an absurd number of seniors in business suits hoping against hope that four years at Harvard is their golden ticket to the Upper East Side.

Their stories are similar: born somewhere, achieved greatness, and had signing bonuses thrust upon them by Goldman, Sachs, Lehman, and other Jews. For them, quaint Cambridge has been either a brief respite from their childhood New York state of mind or else a warm-up for the World Series on the Hudson. Either way, they’ll swarm the platform at South Station as soon as their bags are packed on Commencement Day, departing to better serve thy country and thy client.

I hope I’m not one of them.

It’s not that I’m averse to going corporate or getting rich or following the crowd, and I don’t begrudge my classmates’ taking strangers’ gilded candy. For many, New York is a two-year Ivy League after-party, replete with company cars, expense accounts, and corporate junkets. Is it really so surprising that so many graduates of this country’s greatest university end up in this country’s greatest metropolis?

And yet, I think I’ll pass. You see, I’m not like most Harvard students—I’m one of the roughly 10 percent of undergraduates with a foreign passport. For us internationals, post-graduation planning is a delicate subject—should I stay or should I go?

For all its talk of internationalism and global education, Harvard remains an expensive re-education camp, proselytizing the American dream. After three years here, if someone asked me if New York was the centre of the universe, or if achieving international renown depended on living or working in this country, I would instinctively agree. I certainly didn’t think that way in high school.

It’s alarming to see one’s goals shift so markedly while at university. It’s painful to imagine being left behind as all the cool kids from college move to “the City” next year, reduced to periodic contact by email and Facebook, provided the bandwidth in the Great White North holds up. New York doesn’t just loom large in the consciousness of the upwardly mobile; it is the sine qua non of their hopes and dreams.

For those of us who aspire to success but not to American citizenship, falling out of step in the march to Midtown is frightening. Overriding the hardwiring of a Harvard education and ignoring the standing orders to bank, consult, and dream of season tickets to the Met—just for the bragging rights—leaves one feeling instantly insecure. There are plenty of reasons that a person would choose the A train over their home and native land, but when deciding otherwise brands you as an exception, it makes the decision to return home truly scary.

I decided this summer that I almost certainly couldn’t live in the United States for the rest of my life. It wasn’t a spiteful decision. This is a wonderful country populated by wonderful—if somewhat obese, abrasive, and bellicose—people. But it isn’t my country, and no matter how long I might have to live here, I sincerely doubt that it could ever be home. If I am to be true to myself, I’ll need state-funded healthcare, official bilingualism, and curling to survive.

I didn’t come to that realization flushed with patriotism, however, but with profound insecurity. Being an unapologetic Canadian at an American university means setting oneself up for a painful break-up at the end of four years. By heading for home, one kisses one’s classmates, nascent New Yorkers all, goodbye. Even more difficult is abruptly ending a four-year long romp with the American dream, bidding farewell to the expectations of greatness bred into every single Harvard student by our education and our peer group. The hubris of American culture largely trickles down from the elites educated at schools like this, and even a conscientious objector is hard pressed to emerge unmarked by an irrational conviction that things in this country are, in fact, bigger and better than they are at home.

At the end of the day, some international students have it easy. Plenty of Harvard graduates from sub-Saharan Africa return home to make immense contributions to countries where their expertise is desperately needed. They may not tread the usual path to New York high society, but they leave college assured that they are making good on their education. In a sense, they transcend the usual expectations; for them, Harvard never was Times Square with training wheels—it was a repository of experience and expertise that might be transported home to improve the lot of one’s countrymen. It’s a scenario that’s difficult not to romanticize.

It’s all much harder when you come from plain-and-simple Canada or, worse, from the American Midwest or Southwest or South or West or Northwest or anywhere but two cities in California and one in Illinois. Take the romance out of your place of origin, and not moving up to the big leagues is hard to justify. “I’m going to work in agricultural reform in Boise” just doesn’t sound like a good enough excuse for not moving to New York with the rest of the world.

It’s a product of our collective egotism that, by the end of our time at Harvard, all we really ever want is to pretend to start hating the Red Sox. We’ve been trained to be king of the hill and taught that we can’t be top of the heap if we don’t live within easy reach of Penn Station. Harvard’s worldly education only seems be preparation for a small handful of U.S. Zip codes.

I’m okay with the prospect of never being part of the Ivy-encrusted Uptown elite. I’m okay with being a small fish in a small pond, not the East River. I know that if I do eventually live and work outside of this country, my classmates will probably never read about me in the papers. And for someone arrogant enough to be at Harvard in the first place, that’s terrifying.

­­—Adam Goldenberg ’08, an editorial editor in Winthrop House, would really rather go home to the Swing Era, which—alas!—is not possible.