A Sense of Entitlement

I survived Commencement and became a graduate of Harvard College exactly one year ago. The Class of 2006 endured torrential rain—and considerably less famous speakers—as we finally earned the framed piece of paper representing the best education available. The speeches and writings that surrounded this event were filled with endless messages of hope, repetitive retrospection, and overstretched metaphors. Many of us were reduced to sobbing shells of human beings, but some of us endured the pomp and circumstance and lived to tell the tale.

In the interest of using this space for something other than another “follow your dreams,” “congratulations,” or the type of message you might find on one of those one-sentence motivational posters, I’m going to talk about entitlement. Harvard students have an amusingly misguided sense of entitlement, but after graduation that same sense becomes, within reason, something admirable.

While there are endless examples of selfless and modest students across this campus, an underlying feeling of entitlement reigns quietly supreme. As I worked with the College Events Board and First Year Social Committee to plan events throughout this year, I was surprised to find that many students, unaffiliated with social programming, were armed and ready with detailed post-mortem lists about how each and every event should have been run.

Despite the weeks of preparation and effort by the students involved in planning these events, a significant number of Harvard students always felt that they could do it better and were ready to tell us how ridiculous we were for not being able to, for example, control the weather.

Of course, the entitlement of a Harvard student is carried over from an understandable, if long forgotten, place: high school. To get here, you had to be a hardworking and dedicated high school student with a hefty extracurricular schedule. You all did that. You earned your spot here. Good job.

But once students get here, most of them realize that they can’t always be the special snowflake. Sometime during Freshman Orientation, it becomes clear to the members of each new class that the smartest kid from high school is now just another kid in the entryway. Yet even as students develop a degree of modesty and homogenize into one of the 1,000 people in Ec 10, the entitlement continues to bleed into their more modest existence. The lingering need to be on top results in the unintentionally hilarious accumulation of officer positions, academic prizes, and memberships in some of our 300-plus student groups.

This accretion of activities results in a campus with a collective personality that can at times seem whiny, over-inflated, and obsessed with being the best. Everyone must constantly lay claim to being the most tired, having the most pages due during reading period, and fuming with greatest intensity about the protest issue du jour. We demand to be heard on every issue and we are sure that, if given the chance, we could do it better than anyone else—whatever “it” happens to be. And, if you don’t let us do things the way we want, we will certainly be up in your face about it. We are entitled to be heard, for we are Harvard students, and that moniker entitles us to demand whatever we want and pass down our opinions without question!

On campus, this need to prove superiority and uniqueness may come across as over-entitled indulgence. Certainly it’s something that we’ve all been both guilty and critical of at different points.

But now that you’re leaving for the outside world, I think it’s time to bring entitlement back. While you were here, it was silly to project that you were a special snowflake. Now, you’re done here. And you have done something important and different that makes you stand out. So you should feel a little entitled to walk out into the world with a quiet confidence that things will work out for you and that you will be able to make a difference.

Beware of the trappings of entitlement, which continue whether the entitlement is justified or not. Everywhere you go, people will simultaneously expect great things from you and be ready to knock you down. The more you flaunt that you’re there to change the world, and that you are credentialed to do so because of your fine Cambridge alma mater, the more people will try to put you in your place. Rely on your personal strengths, not on your credentials. They’ve both been earned in your four years here, but the former will serve you better than the latter in the years to come.

In short, it is now officially acceptable to bring entitlement back: You’ve earned it.

John T. Drake ’06 was an English and American literature and language concentrator in Eliot House. He is currently the Campus Life Fellow.