How Harvard Makes Us Foreigners

When I came to Harvard from India, I did so with the intention of studying the developing world. I understood the irony of going to the United States to learn how to contribute to South Asia, but when Harvard came calling it was very hard to refuse.

I tried to make up for this cross-ocean selling out by filling my schedule with classes that assuaged my guilt: a history seminar on political independence and economic development in Africa, public policy and politics of the Middle East, and Indian Literature in Translation, a kind of lifeline to home. But all I received in many of my courses was a filtered, diluted, adulterated version of the Global South — the equivalent of watching a yellow-filter movie set in the slums of Dhaka or the saturated favelas of Rio.

To blame Harvard alone for my dislocation, however, would be unjust.

The international students Harvard admits are rarely the ones who can truly offer this institution the maximum amount of diversity. The kids at my school who applied to colleges abroad knew the U.S. intimately already. They watched American movies, listened to English music, and barely spoke their native languages — and I was no different. I did not grow up on the streets of Mumbai or shopping in Chandni-Chowk in Old Delhi but instead ate Domino’s pizza under the light of the skyscrapers of Bengaluru’s booming I.T. sector.

Knowing that we would probably apply abroad from the moment we entered high school meant we shaped our lives to the standards of international colleges. We watched documentaries about the British forces at the Somme in our history classes, spent time on Reddit researching the PSAT and the SAT, looked at all the extracurricular activities that kids in America were doing and mimicked them.

The pressure to look and act like other applicants, even in a system that supposedly encouraged individuality, persisted — because how were the admissions officers supposed to be able to understand our uniqueness if it was not couched in language and experiences they could understand with minimal effort?

This ability to assimilate from afar is a privilege. It requires the resources and ability to engage with a completely different culture from one’s own. The students who can do this are already removed from the vast majority of their country’s population, and therefore their culture and way of life. Harvard misses swaths of talented students from around the world because those students believe they would never be able to get in, and thus don’t even apply.

This generalization is obviously not true of every student and every country, but is definitely a clear trend in the international student body, particularly from the developing world. Close your eyes and imagine the average Indian. Whether inspired by Slumdog Millionaire or riding a cow, that person looks a lot more like the median Indian — even the median urban Indian — than any of the students I know from India who were accepted to the College Class of 2026.

But when we come here, we are asked to speak for our country. I have never felt more Indian than when I have been here, alone, and faced with incessant questions from other students about my home country. And at the same time, I have never felt more Americanized, learning how to view my home through the eyes of neoliberal economics and modernization theory.

All our lives, many of us felt like we lived with one foot in each world, never really global citizens but never really children of our country’s soil. Going to an institution like Harvard pulls us further away from a home we are already hesitant to call our own.

Perhaps, then, what I should aim for is not to be acted upon by Harvard but to act upon it. If I don’t make the active effort to find the classes that focus on what I want to learn, can I really complain about Economics 10b: “Principles of Economics” slides that contrast suited Americans smiling at the camera with Indians fixing a bullock cart? Harvard does not make this easy. In many courses, the non-U.S. is usually only important as a counterpoint, a mirror to our real focus. At best, these classes will devote a slide to the Global not-West every few sessions, a single lecture in a semester, sometimes even just a footnote in a reading.

But what Harvard will always have is opportunities, resources, information — if I go that bit further and look for them. It will have rooms full of census data from the developing world, hiding under Lamont. Centers devoted to studying parts of the Global South shelved above coffee shops in the Square.

Indian poet A.K. Ramanujan once said that tradition is not a birthright, but that it has to be “earned and repossessed.” Perhaps coming to Harvard can be my opportunity to discover it, reimagine it, and begin to live it.

Ananya Ganesh ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Leverett House.