Forget the Fishbowl

Over Thanksgiving break, my brother tried to explain to me how fantasy football works.

You want each of the players on your team to get lots of points. When you watch football games, you aren’t just following the ball, letting the athletes battle it out, and hoping the better strategy will carry the day. Instead, you are keeping an eye out for each reception, passing yard, and rush, hoping you’ll see higher numbers next to smiling avatars in the little app on the mobile phone you carry around in your pocket.

This may sound perplexing (I am still somewhat perplexed), but if you are a Harvard student in 2023, you already get the gist. We are the avatars for thousands of players who are keeping score. They notch points when we raise flags, go viral, sign statements, get owned. They write articles and retweet and protest by the gates. The numbers climb. The avatars keep smiling.

A Harvard friend recently told me that going here is just not worth it. Even if you’re dead set on elite higher education, there’s always Princeton University or Yale University — just as elite but with fewer newscasters on your walk to Ec10 (or equivalent).

In a sense, she was right: Campus discourse is constantly hijacked by attention from the outside. It seems students opine to a faraway audience rather than discuss amongst themselves, sounding out new ideas and untested viewpoints the way college students are supposed to. The closed Yard, the ID checks, the helicopters hovering overhead — they all add fuel to a culture in which our ideological divisions feel threatening rather than generative.

I agree with my friend: The Harvard fishbowl makes it far harder to talk about the issues that matter most. The constant pressure we feel from the outside — sometimes in the form of harassing, personal attacks — nudges us to internalize our viewpoints as part of our identity.

Is it any wonder that students facing a doxxing campaign may then interpret any response to their ideas as an attack against them? At the same time, we’re made to feel even more like victims, as outside supporters portray their side’s views as under siege on Harvard’s campus.

This has real effects: Instead of turning to peers to refine our own and each other’s ideas, many of us feel unsafe and turn to grown-ups for support. This delegation of disagreement has done terrible things to our ability to engage in constructive discourse. When we perceive discussion as literally threatening, it’s no wonder that dialogue suffers.

But besides transferring to some quieter place, I wonder what we can do with this state of affairs. It would be wrong to close off Harvard to outside observers.

First of all, nobody has ever said Harvard needs to be more of an ivory tower or do a better job at being exclusive and out of reach. So let’s not.

Second of all, we are, for better or for worse, a public commodity. Like the United States president or Sesame Street or Granny Smith apples, Harvard the symbol belongs to the American discourse, and if the discourse uses us as a political football, then a football we are.

Instead of seeking privacy, I hope we can start by reflecting on why people feel so strongly about seeing their opinions reflected on our campus.

Harvard seeks to create the leaders of the future, but it seems the world expects us to start leading even now. People care what we say not only because they anticipate we will become presidents, CEOs, or entrepreneurs, but also because Harvard itself is a leader. This shouldn’t come as a surprise — when we chose Harvard, perhaps we even looked forward to the platform.

No matter the circumstance, I hope we will see ourselves as players, not avatars. If every quarterback were to aim only to maximize their fantasy backers’ profits, say, by making as many passes as possible instead of attempting only to win, football would be (even more of) a really boring and weird game. But football isn’t about accruing points in odd ways to bump up virtual teams’ standing in an algorithm — it’s about hard work and raw talent combining to showcase the heights of human achievement.

In our discourse, too, we mustn’t look merely to score points. When we focus on complaining about our opponents’ tactics, pull publicity stunts to try to get our faces in the news, and shut down our opponents rather than engage, we miss out on the meaningful, ideas-based discourse we could create instead.

I hope, then, that we won’t allow ourselves to become fantasy football players. Our discourse will be better if we step onto the field and forget the fishbowl.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner ’27, a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Hurlbut Hall.