High School Isn't Over

THERE ARE TWO kinds of stories you can tell about Harvard--the uproarious, chummy stories you tell when you're drunk with your friends and the more bitter, more realistic accounts you render when someone asks "What is Harvard really like?"

After two or three beers, I enjoy talking about my ex-roommate who liked peanut butter and bologna sandwiches, about the night four of us inched across the Adams House roof to break into the pool at 2 a.m. I like talking about The Crimson comp, about loud concerts, and stupid jokes my drinking partner has heard also.

But that's not the stuff Harvard is made of. It's only the stuff that my Harvard is made of. Not that it matters, of course. You'll have different jokes and lies and beers, but in the end they'll leave you with the same dreary question--is it all worth it? It really is quite a good question.

I can't say much for the freshman year at Harvard. My entry proctor chose the people in Straus Hall so that we'd win the intramural championship. He had one space left over. I filled it.

An Irish working class kid from Boston who lived across the hall from me told me every other day how I wasn't giving Nixon a chance. Listening to Nixon, for me, is like asking my dentist to give me a toothache. I didn't get along too well with my entry.

Of course, I met a couple of important Harvard types. There was the wealthy, fantastic tennis player who left his mind behind on the team bus one day. There was an up-and-coming Texan capitalist--the counter-cultural kind who dresses down to rip you off. He pats your back with one hand, picks your pocket with the other. There was also the budding urban pol. He was one of the nicest but most difficult to live with. To see yourself as a future bureaucrat, a part of you has to have died a bit early in life.

Besides missing intramurals, I also missed the President's Opening Day Speech. The hardest part of adjusting to Harvard--unless you're rich, which means you have to pretend not to be adjusting to Harvard--is understanding that you don't have to do what you don't want to do anymore.

I didn't go to the President's speech because I'd attended a New York Harvard Club dinner for incoming freshmen several weeks before. I'd expected to get a big, savory dinner while I sat in some overstuffed Crimson chair admiring myself for entering the hallowed halls of Ivy men. Instead, I got warm beer and soggy peanuts, lousy films of a Harvard-Yale tie I wouldn't have cared about had I been there, and a speech by what looked like a warmed-over corpse telling us we didn't have to talk to those h-i-p-p-i-e-s in Harvard Square. I knew I didn't have to talk to hippies. What I wanted was a promise that I wouldn't have to take to him.

Anyway, I didn't want any of the President's soggy nuts. So I overslept and felt guilty for it. I thought you automatically failed all your courses unless you did everything on the freshman week calender. It takes about two years at Harvard to get over your toilet training.

The first people you'll hate are the walking Harvard decals, the people whose first $100 is spent on a Harvard banner, a Harvard mug, a red-and-white Harvard T-shirt, a white-and-red T-shirt, Harvard blotters, Harvard neckties, Harvard scarves, and red and white underwear that glows "Veritas" in the dark with the words to ten obscene Harvard band songs cross-stitched in the inseam. I once sublet an apartment from a recent Harvard alumnus who actually had the only complete set of Harvard cocktail glasses I've ever seen outside the Coop.

THE NEXT GROUP you hate depends on where you come from. If you're middle class and feel guilty about it, you'll hate everyone and everything without knowing why. You'll read Das Kapital. Then you'll know why.

The choice of targets is virtually limitless--the other pre-meds who will deliberately tell you wrong information so you'll flunk an exam, the aesthetes who think talking politics is well, you know old boy, just a mite vulgar, the rock climbers and flower children who have experienced it all and the mindless future technocrats who actually care whether Scoop Jackson of Hubert Humphrey runs for president in '76. And this even without the war criminals and apologists--after all, Henry Kissinger was a Harvard man, too.

The point is, of course, that you can do something about it. Obviously, if all this stuff were unbearable, I wouldn't be here. No one would be here. There are sources of strength. You have to find them and build on them. And first, you have to know yourself.

You have to know what the people in charge here expect you to be. They expect you to be passive, but their word for it is "active." They'll give you pleasant things to do and you'll spend a lot of time doing them and, with a little luck, you'll convince yourself you wanted to do them, maybe even that you thought of them. You'll be 40 years old when you graduate. And you may have pleased your parents, but you'll already be dead.

They expect you to be immoral, but they'll call it "open-minded." They'll tell you genocide in Indochina is only a matter of opinion. That'll tell you that the garbage you're fed about Child and Cuba in the press each day is the truth--or little to the left of the truth. You can indeed build something for yourselves, but only if you realize it--and live it and feel it.

When I started this, I promised myself it wouldn't turn into a sermon. I wanted you to think of me as good-humored. So I'll end with a funny story: I once took an economics class in which a student had a question which he immediately asked the teacher. The teacher told him that he'd better be quiet or she'd never call on him again.

Did you really think high school was over?