Militarizing Meritocracy

Harvard has, in recent years, tumbled from the lofty climes of dynasticism to rude meritocracy. Apparently, whoever slaves over each page of text with the most ardor wins. Only the campus’s social scene maintains the admirable vestiges of ages past, wherein an arbitrary elite is permitted to exclude undesirables, leaving them to commiserate in the street over the drunken, menacing friends they might have made. The latest permutation of this base competitive construct is CEB Risk, bringing all the cold calculation of war to an already-cutthroat Cambridge.

This mock military struggle’s arrival is particularly distasteful considering that this hallowed bank of the Charles has, over the course of its grand history, served as a sanctuary for effete, bloated Brahmins interested in evading combat of any kind. Alas, gone are the days when Cabot and Crowninshield could titter lazily about the Lowells over high tea, leaving the bayonets to the plebs. Our aristocratic predecessors had honed repression to an art, ensuring that the intramural conflict was restricted to a biting comment about outmoded décor, or perhaps spilt sherry.

But the plague of modernity has brought to our backbiting a new crudeness. We have eschewed toady gentility in favor of self-serving strife. And now the scoundrels bring us Risk, to rearrange that nasty competitive instinct along arbitrary House lines. The opening bell had hardly sounded before the color-coded trash-talk began. Those same horrid specimens who might otherwise have greedily withheld a study guide or sabotaged a classmate’s project instead spend their hours hijacking his account and sending his beloved soldiers to their doom. The effect is less severe, but the motive just as inglorious.

There isn’t even an admirable end to the whole enterprise. Instead of spending hours before a glowing Apple in an attempt to outshine his section on the following day, a student can now indulge his narcissism with the brutal military conquest of his peers. The former case is irritating, but at least it earned some eager tyke a meticulous knowledge of Kant. And whatever happened to duels? This lust for social dominance could well eradicate itself if we only returned to the days of pistols at dawn.

In light of all this, I suggest an alternative. Next year, the College Events Board should cease its coy posturing and change the name of the game to “CEB Self-Promotion.” The format would be very similar to Risk’s, except that the battles would be rhetorical, the rules prescribed by Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the communistic House element eroded to shameless personal image management. And, of course, MorganStanley will be watching.


James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.