Nothing New Under John Harvard’s Statue

Allegations of student club theft totaling tens of thousands of dollars. A chaotic push to change the student government. A new, bold Harvard president.

No, I’m not talking about the past two years at Harvard, although these events all occurred recently too. I’m talking about Harvard more than two decades ago, as described in the memoir of Ross G. Douthat ’02: “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.” In it, he details these happenings, many of which bear a striking resemblance to the Harvard of today.

Mark Twain said history rhymes but does not repeat. He must not have been to Harvard. History seems to recur here, with students and administrators caught in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal return.

The very same worries that consume current students (including myself) over grade inflation, careerism, and a crisis in the humanities, are also reflected in Douthat’s account of Harvard in the early 2000s. Student sit-ins for higher wages, progressive protests of the Crimson, debates over the core curriculum — does any of this sound familiar? The nouns change, but the verbs stay the same.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of this parallelism. Is it depressing or comforting that we are encountering the same struggles as past students?

For his part, Douthat interprets the repetition of student activism as a vindication of his conservative worldview. He argues that liberal students are never happy with their hard-fought victories and continually agitate for ever-more ludicrous demands. For example, as a student, Douthat was struck by student activists who, upon helping to win a $11.35 hourly wage for janitorial staff, immediately pivoted to demands for $14.00 an hour.

Now in 2023, students are pushing for a $23.45 hourly wage. Douthat would, no doubt, look at current protests as a comical extension of past demands taken to their logical extremes. In a 2005 Crimson opinion piece, current Republican presidential candidate Vivek G. Ramaswamy ’07 exhibited the same conservative denigration of perennial protests for a living wage.

That historical reading, though, misses the point. Ramaswamy and Douthat are correct that campus activism is cyclical and dialectical: Student demands yield administration concessions which yield further demands.

But that does not render such activism meaningless. One could just as easily read the increase in union wage demands as the arc of history gradually bending towards justice. Instead of being absurd, student protests continuously pass along a virtuous cause that will rightfully continue into the future. The repetition of the story is a reason to agitate for change, not a reason to abandon it.

Underlying that insight is a lesson about Harvard more generally.

Coming to college, I thought a university as old as ours would have most things figured out by now. Of course, I didn’t expect everything to be perfect, but I assumed imperfections would be scrutinized and changed over time.

I now know that not to be the case. In higher education, broken systems can remain broken for a long time, despite public awareness of a problem. As far back as 2005, Douthat was sounding the alarm about the overrepresentation of the wealthy at Harvard, but our university remains economically homogeneous.

It turns out that incisive criticism alone often doesn’t resolve intractable problems like grade inflation or excessive careerism. These problems have existed for two decades and may continue for two decades to come.

To some, this scleroticism might vindicate the conservative criticism of universities as overly bureaucratic. But even Douthat and Ramaswamy clearly have some fundamental optimism about Harvard’s capacity to change: They deemed it worth their time to publicly criticize the University in these very pages.

Though their methods differ, it seems to me that the two conservatives and student protesters agree on one thing: Harvard is responsive to criticism given time. I can’t help but agree, having spent hundreds of hours writing about how Harvard and higher education can be improved.

No matter how much Harvard’s history may encourage fatalism, we students can’t help but think about how our school can be better. Sometimes those ideas translate into direct improvements like raises for graduate student workers or ethnic studies cluster hires. More often, they don’t.

But the lack of a clear relationship between criticism of Harvard and change shouldn’t be an excuse for nihilism. While admissions are still dominated by the wealthy, financial aid is more generous than ever. Yes, consulting and finance dominate post graduate professional recruiting, but Harvard clubs and institutions are gradually diversifying employment options. Pressing problems persist, but the contours of the discourse have changed.

Douthat ends his book by saying we should love Harvard “not because it is good (it is not) but because there is good in it, and things worth fighting for.” With that in mind, I will continue to write, students will continue to protest, and Douthat and Ramaswamy will continue to criticize.

To all of that, I say, keep it up! It may be a cycle, but it gets a tiny bit better with each spin.

Aden Barton ’24, an Associate Editorial Editor, is an Economics concentrator in Eliot House.