Is Harvard American Enough?

If the Task Force on General Education has its way, future undergraduates at Harvard College will be required to take one course concerning “American social, political, legal, and economic practices and institutions.” The requirement is a sound one, but it is not a solution to the fundamental concern underlying it: that in an era of accelerating globalization, too many of Harvard’s American students lack a basic affective attachment to their country and its culture.

As Harvard develops into a truly global institution, and as its students prepare to enter a world in which international travel and trade erode national boundaries, the new general education curriculum should reflect the University’s commitment to teaching its undergraduates about the factors that continue to make the United States unique. But while the institutionalization of this requirement is valuable as a symbol of Harvard’s belief in the enduring value of American studies, I worry that for practical purposes, it will not likely achieve much else.

Harvard is indeed in peril of losing its American identity, but the problem is not one that can or should be fixed by a majority vote of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). At its root, this is a problem of emotion, rather than academics. The danger is not that future generations of Harvard students will lose the ability to study American labor markets, read Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” or write essays about the Atlanta Compromise. It is that they will no longer understand, on a gut level, why they are doing those things.

For all the benefits of globalization, perhaps its most obvious pitfall is that it risks replacing vertical, national boundaries with horizontal ones based on class and talent. Harvard graduates have long occupied distinguished places in American society, but they always remained unambiguously part of it. In their cities, factories, churches, and legislatures, they had little choice but to interact and cooperate with their less privileged countrymen. In the wars honored inside Memorial Hall and Memorial Church, they fought and died alongside everybody else.

The world that today’s Harvard undergraduates will enter is fast becoming a different one. It is not uncommon to meet American students who feel more at home in Dubai than in Duluth, in Singapore than in Cincinnati. Many of our classmates know all the best places to eat in most Western European capitals, but never set foot inside Waffle House or Applebee’s. They can name the leader of every country in South America, but don’t know who their city councilman is.

Of course there is no special merit in things like chain restaurants and local government, except that they are part of the fabric that binds Americans together. That should be enough to endear them to us. If not, what does a Harvard graduate working on Wall Street have in common with the schoolteachers and cops whose retirement funds she manages?

This problem goes far beyond the realm of the curricular review. It is the product of an irony-soaked campus culture that all too often spurns simple, earnest patriotism in favor of suave, detached cosmopolitanism.

Harvard is by no means unpatriotic or anti-American, as some of its conservative critics imply. I suspect that nearly all undergraduates, if you were to ask them, would profess a sincere faith in American ideals. It’s just that no one would really ever think to ask. Nationalism is something we study, not practice. We transcend it. This is no Kremlin on the Charles; it is merely Davos on the Charles.

To be clear: my point is not that Harvard should de-emphasize its global character or admit fewer international students. On the contrary, international students illustrate perfectly how benign nationalism and worldliness can go hand-in-hand. My beef is with the Americans who fail to follow their lead.

Last year’s World Cup provided perhaps the most poignant example. It was fun to be in Cambridge during the event. Harvard students, by American standards, are unusually knowledgeable about soccer—it is the world’s game, after all—and students from abroad were rooting passionately for their national teams.

Trouble was, everyone else seemed to be rooting for those teams also. It was difficult to find many people who cared much about the fate of the Stars and Stripes, or could name more than two players on the squad. The competition became a creepy meritocracy in which students supported the most exciting, talented, and glamorous teams. (Which is to say, not the United States.)

By contrast, when I pulled off of U.S. Highway 90 in Pascagoula, Miss., to watch the USA–Italy game, the patrons in the roadside bar didn’t seem to know as much about soccer as their Cantabrigian countrymen, but at least they knew who to root for.

This phenomenon, in the end, is what should trouble those of who believe Harvard must remain an unapologetically American institution. The new general education requirement is welcome, but unless it can help reverse the steady trend toward post-nationalism on campus, it may well prove fruitless. In that case, students lacking an affinity for America should not be surprised if they find, upon leaving Harvard, that America lacks an affinity for them.



Joshua Patashnik ’07 is a government concentrator in Adams House. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Political Review.