Harvard At Second Glance

After I left Harvard in the 1980s, I did not “stay in touch.” While I truly enjoyed and appreciated my undergraduate years at Harvard, two additional years of eating in the Freshman Union and vicariously experiencing freshman angst as a Proctor in Wigglesworth kept me from ever romanticizing or becoming nostalgic for my own undergraduate days. I don’t know if it was swabbing stairwells on Sunday mornings, or chasing squirrels that tumbled down Wigg B’s chimney with a broom, or locating freshmen who had decamped to follow the Grateful Dead, but I had had enough Harvard by the time I decided to move on. So, in 1987, I turned away from Harvard Square and did not look back—for 20 years.

When I returned to Harvard this year as a 2007 Spring Fellow at the Institute of Politics, I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle awakening. I was older, but at first glance Harvard seemed exactly the same: Derek C. Bok was President; Professor Michael J. Sandel, the Bass Professor of Government, was teaching Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice” to capacity crowds; the smart, serious students still wore heavy backpacks, waterproof boots, and puffy down “Michelin Man” coats. There were even disgruntled protesters in Harvard Yard—it all seemed in order and profoundly familiar. Over the course of the semester, however, I discovered that the Harvard I graduated from in 1982 is not in fact frozen in time. Harvard has become more modern, more egalitarian, more student-focused, and even more diverse.

The changes I found are, for the most part, good, but some were initially disconcerting. Let me begin with the obvious: My house is gone. When I first returned to Harvard, I would tell undergraduates that I had lived in “South House.” I was most often met with a polite but pitying nod suggesting they thought I had an active fantasy life. Some junior historian types were aware that the Quad used to be different, but few had more than a misty notion that it used to have something to do with girls. I soon got used to saying that I had lived in “Cabot” —which still elicited pity, but of a sort familiar to any undergraduate who has ever been “Quadded.”

Female students sometimes asked me if I had belonged to a sorority. I told them firmly that there were no sororities at Harvard. This was my turn to be wrong—there are, and apparently today’s young Harvard women enjoy being “punched” as much as the young men of our era did.

And while the housing lottery still generates the tension, joy, and social crisis it did 28 years ago, the randomization of the results has stripped the Houses of their unique personalities. Here was an area where my young students were eager to hear tales of “Old Harvard” about rowdy jocks in Kirkland, Master’s Sherries in Lowell, bohemians in the Adams House pool, and popped collars in Eliot. More than a few expressed the wish that they could have known that Harvard.

But there is also a new Harvard that I wish I had known: a Harvard that is about to inaugurate its first female President; a Harvard that has a woman leading the venerable Government department; and a Harvard where the formerly stodgy, all-male department that I graduated from now offers a class on gender and politics in which a third of the students are male!

A second notable improvement is the new student-focused attitude in Harvard’s administration and teaching faculty. When I graduated in 1982, part of my pride in that accomplishment was simply that I had survived. At times it seemed Harvard almost prided itself on its indifference to the social and academic challenges of undergraduates. Upon my return, I was astonished to find the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub being built in the basement of Memorial Hall, and I was even more amused to hear that the administration had hired a social director to get students out of the library on occasion.

The academic environment is becoming more student-friendly as well. Students are now encouraged to spend some time at a foreign university, and many do. Perhaps even more importantly, the new science curriculum being rolled out by Senior Lecturer on Molecular and Cellular Biology Robert A. Lue and his colleagues is designed to engage the broadest number of students in the sciences and to give students high quality sections and lots of faculty support, helping them not only to succeed, but to like science. The strategy of making tough courses more student-friendly is clearly working: One third of this year’s freshmen took introductory chemistry or biology!

Today’s Harvard is also one where the students are demonstrating an extraordinarily high sense of moral and ethical responsibility even before they leave the confines of the Ivory Tower. In the past five months, I have had the honor of meeting with students who spend their spare time preparing immigrants for citizenship, teaching in the Boston public schools, and working on homelessness policy. Today’s Harvard students are aware of and engaged in the broader Boston community in a way that I believe exceeds the standards we set in the 70s and 80s. Harvard should be commended for supporting and nurturing these student-led efforts, but the students themselves deserve the most credit for their genuine selflessness in the face of all the academic demands that Harvard still imposes.

Returning to Harvard after a 20-year hiatus has renewed my pride in the University, but more than that, it has made me feel even more honored to count myself among that exceptional and innovative group that calls itself Harvard graduates.

Kerry M. Healey ’82 served as Lieutenant. Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2006 and is currently a fellow at the Institute of Politics.