Planet Harvard

If people lived on the moon, I suspect they would find objects from the Earth more valuable than those in their lunar home. Similarly, I know I would find a rock from another planet fascinating, even if it were utterly useless—what would matter to me most is where the rock has been.

We seniors have been here at Harvard for the past four years, and it’s time to ask the question: how much does that matter? To what degree has Harvard prepared us for success? Or, as J. K. Rowling put it in her commencement speech last year, to what extent has it prepared us for failure? Despite Harvard’s opinionated student population, the university’s biggest challenge remains providing us with a well-balanced education offering a variety of ideological views, the kind of diversity we are likely to encounter in the world beyond our gates.

Four years ago, when I entered the U.S. for the first time, the campus reminded me in some aspects of a space colony. One of its most immediately puzzling aspects was political. I remembered reading what Naomi Klein had written in January 2000 about the American left: that it apparently “seemed surprised to learn that, contrary to previous reports, it did, in fact, still exist.” Although news reports tried to convince me that Republicans were in power, I saw very little Republican presence on campus, and didn’t know any personally. Although I would meet a few eventually, the political uniformity reinforced my notion of Harvard as a somewhat sheltered planet of its own.

Sure, most of us would not seek to go to a school where ideological diversity is completely maximized. It is unpleasant to face constant disagreement, and college is supposed to provide more than challenging conversations. Even so, it’s a shame that it’s so easy to live on campus for months or even years without really experiencing what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, the feeling of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. While questioning our positions generally feels unnatural, few things are as essential. I sincerely hope that after four years here, we will be more inclined to change our minds when exposed to new facts.

What is sometimes even more difficult to change than our views are the internal “choice rules” that we hold. In some way, many of us have learned the most not from texts and lectures, but by observing our reactions to them and by becoming aware of our habits of thought and the limits of the human gift for “zooming out” to reflect on a subject from the perspective of someone else. The key to my learning, at least, was the attempt to eliminate an automatic creation of opinions.

Not long ago, some experts questioned the usefulness of higher education, claiming it essentially fails to increase students’ productivity and reviving the theory that we use our degrees to merely “signal” skills or ability to employers, with actual learning taking place on the job. It was therefore reassuring to talk to an experienced professor recently who told me about his first experience of teaching a freshman seminar. Prior to teaching freshmen, he only worked with upperclassmen and his new teaching assignment allowed him to realize one thing. Apparently, we may be more enthusiastic as freshman, but our thinking and writing leaves a lot to be desired. Somehow, by the time we reach our senior year, we mature in both respects, he said.

Of course, in its attempts to supply us with as much of what we desire as possible, Harvard is a purveyor of much more than education. Although it is not quite clear whether former university president Larry Summers really referred to the college as “Camp Harvard” he was not far from the truth if he indeed had made the comment. We swim in activities and sometimes neglect classes. The word “camp” also implies a fixed space, which quite accurately describes that few of us leave campus as frequently as we all agree would be beneficial for our health. The term “Harvard bubble” has gained a firm place in our vocabulary for this reason.

Summers told us shortly after resigning that we should never ask what we are against; we should define ourselves by what we are for and do our best to make a difference. One cannot really fail by being against an opinion or a policy: it just means living in a state of perpetual disagreement with the external world. Failure is possible when we are for something, and that’s what we should choose to do in the years ahead.


Jan Zilinsky ’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Mather House.