Learning to Live With A Degree From Harvard

(The author is a graduate student in American Civilization and a tutor in American History and Literature.)

WHEN I was in high school, I played football. Football games in the late 1950's were still public events through which the community attempted to express its group identity. For me, as for many other members of the team, this representative function worked its way back into the home, for fathers had played football for the same town team, as had brothers. Thus, for many of us, there was the combined problem of actively competing to belong to the team which in its turn signaled authentic membership in community and family traditions. The emotional and physical exertion of this role assumption made football more often a matter of stern social duty rather than a pleasurable sport.

Every Friday during the football season, the entire high school would meet for a mass rally in the gymnasium. The team would sit conspicuously on folding chairs placed out in the middle of the floor, and the cheerleaders would begin their chant:

"We're from Brookline, And no one could be prouder. And if you don't believe us, We'll yell a little louder."

Gradually, as this chant of identity was repeated louder and louder, it would spread from the nine cheerleaders to the entire student body, almost shaking the impersonal wood and brick of the functional, modern gymnasium. Here was my first experience of being a representative person.

Later, in 1959, when I went to Dartmouth College, it was a recapitulation of the same process of identification. The Ruskinian-Romanesque college chapel at Dartmouth had been built in the memory of an ancestor of mine, Daniel Gustavus Rollins. I had been reading the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine since the fourth grade, had attended football games played by my brother Phillip, had heard of my father's kicking a field goal which helped Dartmouth beat Princeton in 1929. With all of this lore behind me, I studied the freshman manual, learned all of the Dartmouth songs before I arrived on campus, never went out those first few months without my freshman cap (which meant that during freshman week I carried a lot of furniture for upperclassmen) and got myself royally drunk (i.e., in Dartmouth fashion, to the point of unconsciousness) before the first football game.

As if to solder the final link in this chain of traditionalism, I joined the Marine Corps' Platoon Leader Corps (ROTC). My father had been a Captain in the Marines during WWII, my brother had been a Corporal in the Korean War, and a publicity sheet called The Marine Corps Reservist had come to my home every month along with the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

BY JUNE OF 1961, I was very tired of Dartmouth. My football career terminated with the end of the third-string team's season. I soon discovered that undergraduate life at Dartmouth was depressing, isolating, and that all that was bad about the historical Sparta (including the community of women) was also wrong with the Big Green.

After a summer of six weeks in a Marine boot camp, I also discovered that I was not able to suppress the disgust which my peers in the officer training program (as well as the training and its goals) elicited.

By January of 1962, I felt that I had given Dartmouth College and Rollins Chapel enough time to come around. I applied to Harvard College as a transfer student, pleading the intellectual aridity of Dartmouth as sufficient cause for moving from one Ivy League school to another. This was my first break with an externally imposed role.

Later that year (the academic year of the Bay of Pigs fiasco) I began to inquire about the nature of a conscientious objector status. Here began my second break with the posture of representative manhood. Ironically, after being granted a tentative conscientious-objector release from the Marine Officer Program. I decided to rejoin it. This return, however, did not represent a swing of a pendulum from a rebellious position back to a formerly rejected one. Rather, it was the end-product of my study of various radical and dissenting movements in American history, and a rejection on my part of the kind of separatism and apocalypticism which has characterized many of them. The reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History and his Moral Man and Immoral Society during the era of Kennedy nationalism was a significant ingredient to this assumption of active responsibility by me.

PARADOXICALLY, the Harvard identity was as difficult to bear as had been the former Dartmouth identity. The new difficulties came from a new source, however: rather than my own rejection of an imposed definition of self, the new conflict arose from the reactions of others to what they saw in me as a Harvard man. During my three years in the Marine Corps, my Harvard background represented an ever present threat to young officers around me. Most of them felt an almost brutalized sense of their own inferiority in the presence of a Harvard man. Within the Marine Corps' sense of priorities, the earning of twin expert rifle and pistol badges stood on the same level of demonstrated merit. To the chagrin of many, I earned both of these coveted symbols of mastery.

Ever since this recurrent set of experiences in the Marine Corps became part of my sense of presence when dealing with people, I have encountered a new kind of conundrum. Before, the problem of group identity had been one of adopting roles traditionally presented to me for acquisition. All of them had been imposed by an outside agency, all had taken a certain amount of effort to attain, but all had needed to be reassessed and either put off, or reassumed on a different basis.

The role of a Harvard man has been difficult, but for entirely different reasons. Anyone who has gone to Harvard knows how many "Harvards" exist under the umbrella of the institutional title. Yet to others I have met, it has always meant something either essentially threatening or something which has conveyed upon the bearer of it an almost beatific quality. From my Marine training I remember: a platoon commander from West Point screaming in my face that I had written "Harvard College" rather than "Harvard University" on my registration forms as some kind of subtle joke; peers in training stunned and disturbed when I was required to attend study hall because I had flunked an exam on the. 45 caliber pistol; a few confused, but sincere peers projecting upon me all of their own intellectual aspirations and longings for status. Gradually, I came to realize that being a "Harvard man" for me had little to do with what one had been told he must be by his family, his community, but was some kind of screen upon which those who sense their own inferiority in the American middle-class world either projected their resentment or their reverence.

Ironically, after all of my independence and transvaluation of the values of my family and its traditions, I had become a stereotype, not for myself or those intimate with me, but for those with whom I was to deal in the world of work. (The converse has also been interesting-being a former Marine Officer in the Harvard Graduate School of 1970!)

THUS when I attended my first professional gathering, the American Studies Association convention in 1969, I was somewhat prepared to be the Harvard man, but not as prepared as I ought to have been. I went to survey what those outside Harvard who were working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies thought about the field and its challenges. Some of this kind of information was provided by the papers and informal discussions, but so was another aspect of academic life: I discovered that my name tag, covered with shining, transparent plastic, was to most of the attendants a kind of eye-searing lamp which exposed to them their own sense of insufficiency. Because I wore a sign reading:

"Peter C. Rollins Harvard University" on my lapel, I was invited to the president's suite for cocktails, deferred-to in discussion, stared at by older, more knowledgeable men. My wife and I heard the same message over and over again in discussions: "You are from Harvard. What you think is important. What we in the lesser Establishments throughout the country say doesn't weigh as much. You talk, we will listen."

Because I attended that professional meeting with something of an outsider's detachment-I read no paper, participated in no formal discussion-I dismissed this attitude of inauthentic identity as a product of the atmosphere of Toledo, Ohio.

UNFORTUNATELY, I discovered to my perplexity that when attending the American Historical Association (Boston) and the Modern Language Association (New York) meetings this Christmas vacation, I encountered the same kind of defensiveness on the part of those who interviewed me for jobs. No matter how justified or unjustified the ultimate judgment may be on an absolute scale, there is something which non-Harvard people see about the candidate who is a Harvard man.

One interviewer from a Southern state college almost fell back onto his unmade bed when I showed him my credentials. While waiting outside his hotel room, I had talked to those in line. When I dared to question the selection of 1876 as a terminal date for the job description ("American History to 1876"), my competitor for the position gave me a short and slashing lecture on the process by which distinct historical eras come to a close or begin. When I mentioned my reservations about the quality of the students, he dismissed my maunderings with the statement that I might as well apply to Harvard or Yale if I was worried about the quality of students. Then to enter the untidy room of the interviewer:

"Oh, I like these credentials. Harvard, huh? I spent a wonderful summer at your summer school many years back, and have fond memories of my stay in Cambridge....

"Here, let me show you our school."

He showed me a slender glossy pamphlet on the school. When the library was described, a peculiar emphasis was placed on the wall-to-wallcarpeting, while little was said about research facilities. Turning to the front page which bore the face and words of the college president, I indicated to the interviewer that gracing the shelf behind the president's head and just out of the camera's focus was a set of The Harvard Classics, that six foot shelf of great books collected by President Eliot over fifty years ago. On the cover of this promotional pamphlet were the ".. words by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes [which] express the philosophy and purpose of this university and were the inspiration for the university seal:

'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past!'"

Thus I discovered that down at the deepest foundations of the soul of this country are images of a few institutions of legitimacy which determine what shall and what shall not be considered worthy of thought and literate consideration.

In another interview with a professor from a Western school, I found myself apologizing for assigning too much reading to my students and promising (if I were hired) not to press so much work on the students of his university. Furthermore, I found myself explaining that not only would I not be hastily disappointed by the quality of the student body at his school, but even arguing that I really and truly had retained the common touch: he pressed me to explain what I had done in my creative writing class at the Massachusetts Women's Prison; how I had taught my three illiterate privates in the Marine Corps to read; that I really could treat average human beings with respect.

In one of my most important interviews, I was told another, related story of personal identity. A very bright, heavily published, thirty year old assistant professor explained to me how he had weathered an interview of his own at Wisconsin. The senior interviewer had been a dean at Princeton. This former dean opened the interview by noting that while the young Westerner had indeed published, he had not published in the best magazines. The young man went on to tell me that after this opening gun he had been cowed to such a degree that he gave up any effort to sustain a good impression for the rest of the interview, and that he proceeded to get thoroughly drunk immediately after the session. It had been sufficient to be accused of inauthenticity by an Eastern intellectual to be thoroughly unmanned. And not so unexpectedly, this same assistant professor said that he liked me because I did not conform to what he considered to be the Harvard stereotype. What he did not say (possibly even what he did not know) was that the Marine Corps stereotype had somehow shattered the Harvard stereotype in his mind, and that the other Harvard applicants for the same position had not been similarly divested of the Harvard mantle. Thus, his liking for me was not a matter of kindred spirits interacting, but really due to accidental malfunctioning of stereotypes, so that my physical presence was less threatening to him, less cold and less detached than that of others whom he had interviewed from Harvard and Yale.

MY FINAL INTERVIEW brought into play an uglier side of the stereo-type and its effects. In this particular setting, the director of an American Studies program at a Western school interviewed me for his own pleasure more than as an academic necessity. After the usual jockeying for a topic to discuss, he gradually worked himself into a discussion of the (to him) shameful neglect with which Harvard's American Civilization program is supervised. One could sense the need of this tenured man from a coastal tomato field to assert his own identity by striking out at that oppressive ogre in Cambridge, through me, the local embodiment. Suddenly, I found myself defending Harvard's tough-mindedness, its neglect of graduate students in the name of intellectual individualism. I was rebuking this man of the West with all the hauteur of the mythical Harvard man ! It was only a final touch of logic that the Chamber of Commerce pamphlet which described the town in which this man's college was located, showed, in its street guide, that every street and avenue bore the name of an Eastern college (a Harvard Avenue) or historical figure prominent before the westward expansion of the nineteenth century.

Before flying back from the Modern Language Association convention in New York, I attended a cocktail party given by my friendly assistant professor. His friends were there, many of them in search for jobs as I was, and as I listened to them, so unassuming in their intelligence, so self-depreciating in their manner that they were almost ashamed to look me straight in the eye. At one point in the random discussion, my interviewer reported that he had just lost his first choice, "the one David Reisman said he found intellectually intimidating."

My respect for David Reisman not withstanding, I answered in true Harvard fashion that such an effect was not difficult to obtain. Such a retort in a Harvard setting would be considered fair play, a verbal means of keeping one's own balance by staying out of the magnetic attraction of a world-renowned intellectual presence. How many times have Harvard students walked through the streets around Harvard Square without seeing such figures as James Baldwin, J.K. Galbraith, Eric Erikson, Edmund Wilson, James Dickey, Robert P. Warren, Norman Mailer, to name only those whom I have personally seen. These men seem to belong in the Cambridge setting, even if in many cases they visit Harvard only as guest lecturers. It would be impolite to be too impressed by their presence, just as it would also be dangerous to the self to be too worshipful of them.

Thus, when I answered that it was not difficult to intellectually intimidate David Reisman, all conversation at the party stopped. I could see the eyes of the brilliant young man in front of me dilate. I watched him choke slightly on his scotch as he feebly mumbled something about not being aware of that. My only way out of such an impasse was to go into the bathroom of the small suite with the hope that the discussion which I had stopped would resume by the time I had refilled my glass with ice and scotch.

As I left New York that night, I reflected on what I had seen, and the meaning of being a Harvard man. Undoubtedly part of the problem of looking at a Harvard man from an outsider's point of view can be related to a long, ingrained geographical and cultural sense of provincialism that is part of the ethos absorbed by those who grow up in the middle and far Wests.

But in a deeper and more human sense, Harvard is an ideal more than an institutional reality. Like any other utopian ideal, Harvard has become an absolute value which is referred to by the non-Harvard man when he feels that he or his institution is not living up to the highest conceivable ideals of the life of the mind. Harvard also resembles utopias because it is seen as a place where the normal pressures affecting ordinary college teachers are not present-a recurrent story told to me by peers at the conventions involved Harvard's indifference towards publication. The moral of this story was always the same: when you reach the height of Olympus, you no longer have to worry about such trivial matters as "publishing or perishing." You no longer have to build those statelier mansions for your soul. You can have a quiet stall in Widener library and merely be.

As a Harvard man who is still looking for a job, who in many ways feels bound to an idea of America which a Harvard identity (and a Marine identity) both occlude, I have truly come upon a unique dilemma in my experience. As I enter the payrolls of my chosen profession, am I to be forever plagued by this Harvard identity? Is it forever to come between me and a proper human relationship with those equally or even more gifted? Or have I become encased in a convenient suit of armor that will be very useful for protection against the infighting and backbiting for which academics are so notorious?

Or does being a Harvard man convey to the unwelcoming possessor of that title an active sort of responsibility which demands of him that he live up to that identity? Being from Harvard, you know that what is worshipped is the ideal, the abstraction, and not the living diurnal embodiment of Harvard. Yet when you turn outside the University, you see yourself again and again being personally identified with it. Ultimately, you realize that you have been entrapped willy-nilly by that identity which others have projected from themselves upon you. The only solution you can properly resign yourself to under these conditions is to live up to the ideal while denying that the actual Harvard of any given moment is any more than an approximation of it.