What Harvard Means

You've probably heard the story about the three blind men and the elephant, the one where each blind man grabs a different part of the animal and each comes away with his own erroneous idea of what it is--the one who grabbed the elephant's tail thinks it's a rope, and so on.

It's like that with Harvard, too. The people here aren't quite so blind, to be sure, but they are intensely, incessantly analytical about themselves and their surroundings. There are few constants in Harvard's 339 years other than that for all that time, people have thought they had the place figured out and disagreed violently on their interpretations.

So to help you understand, here are 30 different Harvards, each almost as real and true as all the others. It may all confuse you, but so, at first, will Harvard.

The Essential Harvard

1 Eliot Superlative Theory

Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard through the late 1800s and the turn of the century, once called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and freest" university in the country. You can't dispute him on the first two points: founded in 1636, Harvard is unquestionably the oldest institution of higher education in America; and its endowment, about $1.4 billion, makes it still by far the richest (University of Texas is second, but it's all new money). As far as freedom goes, well, Eliot was speaking before the advent of experimental colleges where you can do whatever you want. The tremendous freedom still exists for faculty members but the rest of us would probably be a little less fettered elsewhere.

2 Faculty Get Down to Basics Theory

The august Harvard faculty, threatened some years ago by student radicals, was forced to state its principles. This is what it came up with: "The central functions of an academic community are learning, teaching, research, and scholarship."

3 What's All the Fuss About Theory

John Reed '10, the only American buried in the Kremlin, shortly before his graduation summed it up like this: "College is like the world; outside there is the same class of people, dull and sated and blind." Reed's theory probably has less currency than any other; all the rest depend on the notion that Harvard is different, and therefore worth puzzling over.

Harvard the Institution

4 Best Theory

Perhaps the most common of Harvard theories is that it's the Best, period and everything else falls into place from there; no doubt you share that view. All sorts of American education councils are constantly trying to quantify this theory by rating various schools according to esoteric criteria, but for people here it's mostly a matter of whether you believe in your heart that Harvard is the best, or whether you don't. It certainly has bright students and top-notch faculty, but there are always nay-sayers.

The nay-sayers, though, are in their own way subscribers to the Best Theory. Their position is usually that Harvard is not The Best only because it has recently gone to the dogs. They assume that Harvard once occupied the s ate of grace from which it has fallen.

5 Forgotten Undergraduates Theory

Most undergraduates here feel generally that they're getting the short shrift; the conventional wisdom is that if it's just a good college education you're looking for, rather than the Harvard mystique, you should have gone elsewhere. You won't get much individual attention from faculty members, and you're mostly allowed to go your own way. Harvard leaves you alone.

A selling point of this theory is that Harvard College doesn't have the indisputably high ranking among colleges that, say, Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School have among law schools and medical schools.

If asked to elaborate, a proponent of the Forgotten Undergraduates Theory would blame faculty members for his plight, explaining that they're all either trying to publish, or making pots of money doing consulting work, or off skiing in Gstaad. The system for rising through the academic hierarchy here does not, after all, reward teaching ability.

6 Mother Theory

Harvard is like a womb, sheltering you for four years. As Samuel Pitts Duffield '92 put it in a Class Ode,

"Fair Mother, we pray for thy help ere we turn Toward the doubt and darkness ahead;

May the fires of thy beacons flash high as they burn

And illumine the path where we tread."

7 Lover Theory

Harvard is like a coquettish woman, always tempting you with its glories while holding them back. From another Class Ode, by Henry Copley Greene '94:

"Fierce maiden, true life, whom we wooed with grim fight,

In past dreams to thy conquest we woke."

A cruder version is the Whore Theory, which goes like this: "Harvard is like a whore, see, 'cause you pay to get screwed."

This is also probably a sexist theory.

8 Left-Wing Bastion Theory

The late Senator Joseph McCarthy used to refer to Harvard as the "Kremlin on the Charles" and "a smelly mess," and most of you will probably notice that people here are to the left of the people back home. It used to be that Harvard students--a lot of them anyway--were quite radical, and a few years ago there were building occupations and an active SDS chapter and so forth around here. Conservative alumni--one never hears about liberal alumni--are supposed to be in a constant froth about Harvard's extreme liberalism. In 1968 Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey '28 called Harvard students "Walter Mittys of the left," adding, "They play at being revolutionaries and fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down."

All that has died down a bit, but even people considered conservative at Harvard, like Pusey, have fought for causes generally considered liberal, like anti-McCarthyism.

9 Right-Wing Bastion Theory

This theory has two facets: first, that Harvard is conservative in its internal policies, even racist and sexist, and second, that Harvard is conservative by nature because it is an entrenched institution in a conservative nation. From the days of John reed and W.E.B. DuBois '90, who said he was always considered "a nigger on the team" here, people have complained about Harvard's white male ambience. And the University has also had an indirect role in political battles that could hardly be called liberal--from President A. Lawrence Lowell's calls for Sacco and Vanzetti's execution to Henry Kissinger's departure from the Government Department to oversee the Vietnam War. For all its eccentricity Harvard has never been greatly at odds with mainstream, old-line American capitalism. (cf. Ruling Class Theory)

10 General Education Theory

President James Bryant Conant '14 wrote in 1943, "Today, we are concerned with a general education--a liberal education--not for the relatively few, but for the multitude," and thus invented the prevailing optimistic theory about what Harvard College does. You will supposedly come here and become well-rounded and interested in the world around you, and opening your eyes in this fashion is Harvard's institutional purpose. General Education is still around, of course. Your proctor will tell you about it; mostly it means you have to take a science course here even if you don't want to, but the spirit still lingers.

11 Business of Education Theory

President Bok is known to complain from time to time about how administrative his job has become. It's understandable: his predecessors might have been simply educators, but Bok has to be head of a huge, labor-intensive, recession-plagued, hard-to-operate corporation. To make his job easier, Bok and his lieutenants have made Harvard a little more cost-effective, something that runs against the grain of the place and has stirred up some grumbling about how Bok's nothing but a bureaucrat. In any event, Harvard is huge, with a $200 million annual operating budget spread over hundreds of divisions that must each break even. So one could say that Harvard is just another corporation, except that it is in the business of educating people.

12 Philosopher Kings Theory

Before Bok, at least, if you had asked a Harvard savant about who ran the place, he would tell you the faculty did--they were, you see, this group of brilliant, quarrelsome, egomaniacal men, primarily interested in advancing knowledge, who somewhat incidentally kept Harvard going as well. It was an appealing theory because it implied that as long as there were brains here the place would run itself. Now, though, the theory has faded a little. Everybody knows the faculty members think they run the place--but the administrators really do.

The Harvard Man

13 Manifest Destiny Theory

William Bentinck-Smith '37, who was President Pusey's assistant for years and should know, once wrote: "The really important difference between Harvard men and other men is that the former went to Harvard and the latter did not. Like it or not, any entering Harvard freshman is subject to what might be called college predestination."

If you want to concentrate on Harvard as a collection of people rather than as an institution, you have to go on the assumption that there's a sameness to people here; you can be specific about Harvard people, their personalities, backgrounds and fates, or like Bentinck-Smith you can be general: everybody at Harvard (even the women, he must have meant) becomes a Harvard Man, and that's that. No need to define it further.

14 Thirteen Varieties Theory

Before the admissions office went computerized a few years ago--now they are supposed to sit around and say to each other, "I've got a good boy here; he's sort of a 142"--they had a breakdown of all Harvard people into 13 types, designated by letters. There was W, for wheel, which meant an ambitious, driving type, and X, for cross-country, which meant a plodding but determined type, and so on. They were all Harvard men if they were admitted, you understand, but there were still slight variations.

15 Finley Two- and Six- Variety Theories

John H. Finley '25, a semi-retired professor of Greek, is a veteran theorizer. In one well-known version of his Harvard Worldview, there are arrows (ambitious, motivated types) and teacups (those out to find themselves). In another there were six types--activists, scholars, and so on.

16 Yale Three Variety Theory

The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, published by the editors of the Yale Daily News, says there are only three kinds of people at Harvard: wonks (who study a lot), jocks (who go out for sports and drink) and preppies (who join clubs). There are some hippies, the guide admits, but basically if you're not already one of the three classic types you'd best hang it up.

17 Hall Product Theory

Stephen S.J. Hall, vice president for administration, also takes a student-oriented view of the University. "I consider Harvard really one of the finest universities in the world as far as the product they turn out," Hall said last year, explaining why hecame here fromthe Sheraton Corporation. "Basically, that's what we're here for--to turn out a product."

18 Fisher Ten Thousand Factory Men of Harvard Theory

Francis D. Fisher '49, who directs the Harvard office that counsels students on careers, thinks so many people are going to college these days that pretty soon college graduates--even Harvard graduates--will be forced into blue-collar jobs. Fisher's office publishes a book called After Harvard What? that predicts "that new and tougher competition will exist from the brightest Ph.D. on down, that many, no matter how well-educated, will end up doing work of a somewhat different kind than the work which someone similarly educated would have undertaken even a few years ago."

19 Fitzgerald Indoors Theory

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, this is future Princeton man Amory Blaine reflecting on where to go to college: "I want to go to Princeton. I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes... I think of Princeton as being lazy and goodlooking and aristocratic, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors..."

20 You Can't Tell Him Much Theory

Harvard men, this theory says, are Harvard men because they're not--that is, the good thing about Harvard is that it doesn't turn out a pre-stamped, homogeneous product. William James said, "Our undisciplinables are our proudest product," and President Conant agreed: "Harvard was founded by dissenters. Before two generations had passed there was a general dissent from the first dissent. Heresy has long been in the air."

21 Stamped from the Mold Theory

On the other hand: there are those who think Harvard turns out people, or should turn out people, who are similar, upper middle class bureaucrats. The New American Movement, for instance, a local leftist group, published a pamphlet called Introducing Harvard a few years ago that said: "That is what Harvard trains you for: surviving and rising in the bureaucracy of your choice." Even President Pusey, in his Walter Mittys of the Left speech, saw his mission as bringing radical students into the fold, saying: "Bringing students of this persuasion back to reality presents a new kind of challenge to college education."

22 Harvarder- Than-Thou Theory

This is the popular image--Harvard men as snobs, outwardly cynical and blase and self-assured (that's the part Harvard taught them) and inwardly ambitious (that's the part they came with). People have been talking about Harvard snobs for at lest two hundred years and for two hundred years it's been at least partly true. It will be strange, because while at first it will seem more foreign than anything in the world, after a couple years you'll notice--on a trip home, maybe--that without even wanting to you've picked up some of the Harvard manner, too.

23 Not Everyone Can Be One Theory

Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, vice president for alumni affairs and development, went on local talk show a few years back when he was Harvard's dean of admissions. He talked about Harvard and truckdrivers. "Truckdriving is still an honorable and well-paid profession," Peterson said. "All youngsters are not equipped to go to college... all of them have different aptitudes and attitudes." Harvard fit into things thusly: "Harvard stands for excellence and high standards and there is nothing wrong with that." The Boston Globe called Peterson "outspoken" for all that, which is true in that a lot, maybe most, of the people at Harvard probably agree with him but almost none would say so on TV.

The Harvard Life

24 Sex Theory

There was a great 60s junk novel called The Harvard Experiment that was about a college in Cambridge, Mass. (Har-Rad, get it?) where they put all freshman in rooms with members of the opposite sex, just so the could be fully educated. The point is that if you were going to hint plausibly that any American college is a sex haven, you'd hint that it's Harvard. The old tabloid Hearst newspaper in Boston liked that Harvard the best: "HARVARD BARES WILD PARTIES" was its banner headline one day.

On the surface, perhaps it's justified: there are coed dorms here, even coed bathrooms, and everyone talks about sex all the time. You will be able to tell your parents Harvard sex stories that will shock them. But as always with such things, the talk outweighs the action. Harvard's generally exotic image is what makes the sex-haven tag fit.

25 Psychological Meat Grinder Theory

You'll hear a lot of this one this year--in this issue of the Crimson, for instance. One self-acclaimed Harvard savant used to say, "The thing about Harvard is that if you're cool, it's cool. It's only if you've got some flaw, some weak point. Harvard will find it, and bring it out." People are always talking about how intense it is here, how they've changed, how high school seems long ago. Maybe people are happy at Harvard but they're hardly ever

The reason this probably happens is that it's a tremendous shock for people who are used to being big shots to come here and have to adjust to being just like everyone else.

26 Place of God Theory

For much of its early existence Harvard's function was primarily to train young men for the Protestant ministry; the University was founded in piety, and, some say, that piety lives on (it's just a little harder to find these days, having become sort of secularized). On the surface Harvard is a fairly Godless place, and President Pusey used to attract a great deal of derision by saying things about "the present low estate of religion at Harvard." Someone once asked Pusey what the single most important quality for a Harvard president was, and he answered "a belief in God," but nobody says that sort of thing any more.

27 Seat of Learning Theory

The first thing written about Harvard that anyone has been able to dig up is a pamphlet called "New England's First Fruits," apparently designed to entice people into emigrating here. It says the University was founded "to advance learning and perpeutate it to posterity." Years laters Tomas Wolfe's fictional hero, Eugene Gant, came here and started reading books like crazy because "he simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this." If there was anywhere you'd expect a modern Dr. Faustus to turn up it would be Widener Library, but these days, alas, people mostly talk about how they learned what they learned at Harvard outside of classrooms and libraries, how they had "learning experiences" here.

28 Paris on the Charles Theory

There are those who say the specialness of Harvard comes from its location in Cambridge, America's most suave and continental and sophisticated city. That's something of a chicken and egg problem, but people do sit around in coffeehouses in Cambridge a lot and there are a lot of bookstores and newsstands and people talking French in the street. Nobody seems to get up before noon. Where else are there block-long lines to see twenty-year-old Swedish-language films on weekday nights?

Harvard and the World

29 Ruling Class or Training Ground of the Elite Theory

Charles William Eliot said, "There is an aristocracy to which the sons of Harvard have belonged and, let us hope, will ever aspire to belong." Eliot should know; when he came to Harvard he was related by blood or marriage to sizeable chunk of the faculty and administration. It's not quite so close-knit now, but Introducing Harvard maintains, "No description of the educational process at Harvard could be complete without mentioning the college's historic function: educating the sons and daughters of the nation's elite."

The average parental income of students here is sky-high, and the University's Governing Boards, if not its faculty, are still populated by the heirs to America's oldest East-coast fortunes. In that sense Harvard's real function is to train the children of the powerful to take the power themselves, so as to keep it in the family. The reason Harvard graduates have has such a profound influence on America--five of them have been U.S. presidents, countless others presidents of corporations--is not so much their innate talent as their good luck at being born to the right parents. Harvard just added the polish and gave the elite's children a chance to get acquainted with each other.

30 Meritocracy or Breeding Ground of the Elite Theory

The more current view of Harvard in American society is that the University is the ultimate agent of upward socio-economic mobility; a perfect meritocracy, it culls the one or two best kids from practically every high school in America. It's competitive and high-key, so much so that even staunch liberals like David Riesman '31 are beginning to have doubts. In his new book Riesman says the meritocratic atmosphere doesn't do much for learning or finding yourself or that sort of thing. Maybe you'll end up a part of the new anti-meritocracy, slide right through Harvard, and go back to Dubuque after you graduate to work on the farm. By then you'll probably have a few theories of your own