Winning, As Usual

It’s that time again.

Whether in music groups or athletic teams, cultural societies or publications, virtually every one us is facing one of the most stressful seasons at Harvard.

More painful than midterms, more arduous than papers, more awkward than Freshman Week, the various elections and selections of November can be so bad that one wise upperclassman cautioned me last year: “Don’t block with people you know from your activities. By next fall, they may not be your friends.”

The intensity of his advice astounded me at the time, but not any more. In my own slice of Harvard, future politicians, campaign staffers, pundits, academics, and journalists are locked in fiercely competitive—and historically brutal—elections.

Otherwise sane people become hand-shaking, mass-emailing, capital-C Candidates, ignoring everything from midterms to laundry in pursuit of something they love.

There is nothing wrong, necessarily, with single-minded devotion to a cause you believe in, even if that cause is yourself. Or maybe there is, when something that was always supposed to be fun, a distraction from Ec10 or Physics 16 or a senior thesis or all three at once, becomes ugly.

Among the holy trinity of political groups on campus—the Harvard College Democrats, Harvard Republican Club, and the Institute of Politics—the irony is particularly profound, of course. For Harvard’s future politicos, November 5th marked the beginning of the preseason. And only a week later, the rumors are already beginning to swirl.

One campaign supposedly stooped as low as marginalizing its opponent’s race; another had made an issue of their sexuality. If true, the rumors are a harbinger of the month to come. Harvard students are not bigots, yet if provoked we are capable of turning pettiness into an art form.

We don’t have a national media to make sure we don’t say things our better natures would regret. And I suppose, unlike John McCain, we feelempowered to abandon the student organizations we nurtured and were nurtured by at the first sign of personal failure.

Perhaps negative campaigns are inevitable, and perhaps they are necessary. In the interest of discourse, we rationalize argument; in the interest of reform, criticism; in the interest of transparency, gossip. Perhaps. But what ends, exactly, justify these means?

In national campaigns, we are assured that it is no less than the fate of the world. The fundamental importance of winning supposedly exonerates Karl “Boy Genius” Rove to the right, and now Rahm “Rahmbo” Emanuel to the left. Democrats excuse Obama’s waffle on public financing;Republicans defend McCain’s “Compliance Fund.” They send out their best strategists to hem, haw, and equivocate. Journalists, currying favor, perhaps, or tied to their own politics, let them.

We have no such excuse. We can plead neither the immaturity of children, nor the cynicism of adults, nor the incredible self-aggrandizement of Machiavellian world leaders. Not now—not yet. Extracurricular activities in college are never necessary to success in life, but rather a welcome distraction from it. At Harvard, they may be where the next generation of elites practices changing the world—but it is still only practice. And if that elite is so concerned about winning now, shouldn’t we all worry about what it will one day bring?

I know I do, as a member of more than one close community that could be rent asunder by the promise of a few swing votes, and as a constituent of a larger one that obsesses over the machinations of its governing body for one month of the year and nearly ignores it for the other eleven. I’m speaking, of course, about the Undergraduate Council, whose internal politics—insofar as it prevents things from getting done—concerns us all.

In the end, the distinctly Cantabrigian pathology I’ve described has really very little to do with whether we face comps, apps, shoots, punches, or plain-old ballots. It’s the competition itself, the mentality of winning, that is to blame.

As one losing campaign once said, “We take ourselves too seriously, and our work not seriously enough.” It is not easy to win, but when we take arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless titles as seriously as we do, it is even harder to achieve.


Elise X. Liu ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.