What Harvard Students Do

It was that time of year: clubs budgeted for buses to New Haven, organizations coordinated spare beds, and peers shopped for crimson-colored clothing. The Harvard-Yale football game was, and still is, an orchestrated effort for the entire campus. Back in 2019, I’d only been a real Harvard student for a few weeks, but even that much was apparent to me. It’s a social expectation, a cultural norm steeped in hundreds of years of tradition. A communal habit. It is simply what Harvard students do.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the first-year versions of ourselves were concerned with fitting in. Not just into the culture on campus, but into what the world perceives as the Harvard mold. And as malleable pieces of putty souped up on praise, many of us were ready to fill all the crevices to look, talk, and act like a Harvard Student would.

But as I strived to emulate the Harvard legacy, I couldn’t make it to The Game, or any game, in my freshman year. Instead, I was off-campus performing somewhere. One weekend, I was at Dickinson College for Rare’s BE.Hive On Campus, a climate-focused summit bringing together students, scientists, nonprofits, and activists to propose sustainable solutions for college students and the world.

It was my first performance alone. My poem “On Climate Denial” was ready to be presented to an audience of behavioral scientists, climate activists, and students in a newly renovated auditorium with candy-colored bean bags at the foot of the stage. The lighting, probably dim to conserve electricity, casted soft shadows on the two, three chattering clusters of people. I was lucky to be invited in the first place, but it never feels good to perform for an empty audience.

This wasn’t the centuries-old Game. This was just another school event, and you have to be a certain kind of person to attend a climate change summit on a Saturday morning. Back then, if it wasn’t for my speaker status, I’m not sure I would’ve been that kind of person. It’s simply not what college students do.

But, they did.

I walked out onstage to an auditorium so full I couldn’t find my mother in the crowd — even with my glasses on. Groups of friends huddled together on the beanbags, squeezing together for an ounce of comfort. Even after the performance, as I crept into the stands to listen to the rest of the speakers, I was approached by students who eagerly shared the initiatives they were pushing on campus, the classes they took, and the community garden they kept.

A year later in 2020, Dickinson College became one of the first ten colleges or universities in the country to achieve carbon neutrality. Even after this milestone, the campus continues to forge a sustainable future by utilizing their 80-acre organic farm, implementing behavioral-focused programs like the EcoChallenge, and testing new eco-friendly practices on their own campus. Students are required to take a course on sustainability, but 88 percent of their graduates end up taking at least two and 54 percent take at least four. Dickinson College has been recognized as a top performer for five consecutive years in the Sustainable Campus Index.

This is simply what Dickinson students do.

Environments shape actions shape culture; we see it all the time. When you charge extra for grocery bags, people bring a reusable one or shove their CVS snacks in their coat pockets.

When you stick a sign on the washer encouraging students to clean their clothes in cold water, they default to that.

Universities meet young people at a point in their life where they’re not only expecting, but embracing change. Colleges have a unique influence on students’ day-to-day lives and communal traditions, presenting a perfect opportunity to build climate-friendly habits that graduates can take with them.

There are changes I’ve seen around campus — unplugging larger appliances during breaks, using behavior-sensing lights and hand dryers, installing reusable water bottle fillers around campus, and reselling things at the end of the year — but those are all just the start of shaping sustainability at Harvard.

Replacing individual microfridges with community ones, supplying house kitchens or dining halls with easily accessible air fryers and other small appliances we’re not supposed to have, hang drying clothes, exclusively serving plant-based meals one day a week, integrating sustainability courses into the General Education requirements: all of these are actionable changes that can build the practice of sustainability at Harvard. But such cultural shifts don’t come from the middle of nowhere — they’re crafted through a combined effort of students and campus leadership. Together, we set the tone and create the initiatives that become cultural norms. But this can only happen when we, the students, start the conversation.

It’s up to us to open our eyes to the future of our campus. It’s up to leadership to help us realize that vision. But we all have to choose to see it.

That is what Harvard students do.

Jordan A. Sanchez ’24 is a Physics concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column “Everyday Environmentalist” appears on alternate Fridays.