Thank You, Tourists

I am a student at Harvard.

It seems almost ridiculous to even utter those words, let alone type it out. I allow this fact to escape my mind and sight whenever possible because ignoring it allows me to concentrate on my end goals with humility.

What Harvard students such as myself cannot escape, however, are the tourists on campus. We awkwardly stumble through the families hoisting their children up to touch the famous foot of the John Harvard statue. We tediously navigate up the stairs of Widener Library to bypass any possibility of photobombing a future Instagram post. We scrupulously shutter our blinds in an attempt to shelter ourselves from being peeked at outside our windows.

Tourism perpetuates campus life every day; Harvard’s museums alone draw more than 650,000 visitors annually. My daily sightings of tourists on my walk to my Life Sciences 50 class are an incessant reminder of the fact that Harvard isn’t just a college — it is a destination.

We will never be able to break away from the tourists and the public eye. Yet, this reality is a truth we should be grateful for.

Tourism should represent more to us than just flocks of strangers on campus: we must recognize tourists as a symbol of our privilege and our responsibility to utilize the vast opportunities granted to us as Harvard students.

We become desensitized to “normal” sights such as Memorial Hall and Annenberg. We spend countless hours in Widener Library staring at our laptop screens, failing to become entranced in the 3.5 million books surrounding us. What we consider our monotonous and unchanging daily routine is viewed as exceptionally unique to those outside of the Harvard bubble.

I myself was once one of these tourists. During the summer after fourth grade, my family traveled to Boston and decided to pay a visit to Harvard before we left. My vision of Harvard at the time was one of innocent admiration; I was utterly impressed by the school for its prestige and high rankings. My nine-year-old self deemed Harvard an elusive and unattainable pedestal, a college for elites, prodigies, Carnegie Hall performers, and theoretical physics masterminds — a place that would never fit me. I assumed that my first encounter with John Harvard’s golden foot would also be my last.

Yet, 10 years later, I find myself writing this column in my dorm of Pennypacker Hall as a first-year student. The unending strolls of tourists were jarring during my first few weeks of college. Yet, as I rolled my suitcase back into my dorm in preparation for the second semester, I carried a newfound understanding of what Harvard tourism means to me and the campus body as a whole.

Throughout my first semester of college, I had my fair share of frustrations regarding copious assignments, late nights in Lamont, and yawn-inducing morning classes. Encountering tourists across campus, however, left me feeling unjustified in my grievances. As Harvard students, our attention is always directed on another goal: a problem set, an essay, or an A on our next midterm. We become blasé to the awe-inspiring breadth of courses, faculty, resources, and support encompassing us. The Harvard reputation that draws so many visitors to Cambridge is the same world-class stature that we, as students, draw benefit from and take for granted daily.

I do not think I will ever become completely comfortable with the fact that the campus I now call home is also a prime destination for onlookers. What I have come to terms with, regardless, is that this is precisely how my relationship with Harvard tourism should be.

Tourism should make us think. The sight of visitors should leave us contemplating, leave us reflecting, and leave us filled with gratitude. The ebbs and flows of tourism on campus will come and go, but my time here as a student will persist until May of 2025. As Harvard undergraduates, each of us has four guaranteed years on campus. It is both our collective and individual responsibility to make the most of those eight semesters. We should employ our interdisciplinary education, our real-world experiences, and our intrinsic motivations to transform the society we live in today, retaining Harvard’s worthiness in attracting tourists who view this university with such high regard.

My biggest regret will be graduating and leaving this campus feeling like a tourist at a college that I was supposed to make my own. The permanence of my time here is designed to encourage Harvard to change me as an individual while simultaneously uplifting me to leave behind a deeply-rooted impact on the institution itself. Many tourists perceive Harvard students as the future visionaries, innovators, and reformers of society — we owe it to them to never stop striving for our wildest aspirations.

Alvira Tyagi ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Pennypacker Hall. Her column “Reckonings & Revelations” appears on alternate Mondays.

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