What Do I Know?

HARVARD. The very name evokes images of brick buildings, libraries stuffed to the brim with books and four years of study in wood-panneled rooms with the smell of pipe tobacco wafting from all the professorial types gathered around campus.

We all know of course that this image is just one big lie spread about the country by some malicious means. The busting of this image is the first thing I learned when I came to Harvard and nothing could have more influence on the rest of my time here and the education I received.

If this image was just a concoction of some concocted societal consciousness then the goal Harvard. I had worshipped through my four years at high school was false. A blow to my bloated sense of self-worth, perhaps, but a boon to my personality because it made me a skeptic.

Skepticism is good, a friend once said. I'm not so sure, but it does have its benefits. It leads to questions, which is one thing I find too few people asking in this world. And by asking questions, I and others become free from the norms that dominate our society.

"Don't think you're so free to become a journalist," says my father. "Is that what I paid your tuition for, so you could hang out in bushes peeping at a man having an affair?" he asked me when I worked a summer for The Miami Herald.

The answer I give is that I don't want so much to be a journalist in the bushes as a chronicler of two things--myself and my age. I can't do that of course if I am not skeptical. And that is exactly what Harvard does.

How can you not get skeptical when the people grading your papers are graduate students barely three years older than you? How can you not get skeptical when you get a better grade on a paper that you wrote the night before a week-long extension ends than one you work on for months? What all this shows is that quick creative insight based on few facts is the most effective and enjoyable means to get a point across.

Which of course brings us to journalism.

Anyway, back to school. This place has taught me very few new facts, rather it has taught me how to integrate the few facts I know in different exciting orders. In fact, I think there probably are so many facts that one only needs to have a few in a scholarly wardrobe because how can anyone possibly know them all. The only thing one needs to do is to learn how to rearrange them.

Skepticism has also taught me to ask questions. For example, Did you know that Mel Torme wrote The Christmas Song?

I believe it was Sherlock Holmes who said go out and get the facts and build a hypothesis with them. That to me is much too reasoned. My response is to come up with the broad hypothesis and fit the facts into it. This style is a much more exciting means to go about pursuing the truth because what is truth anway except what I perceive it to be. The one truth I held in high school, that of Harvard, proved to be false. I'll never have such a love affair again.

So having been inspired by my Harvard experience, here are a few hypotheseis that I intend to prove in my first few years of journalism.

The problem with America today in the modern age is that the era has gone on too long. When we start calling Buddy Holly songs hits and drink Classic Coke, we know it's time for a new way of thinking.

Literature has gone to pot because all the great young writers and Mark Twains of today are now in Hollywood writing the Great American Screenplay. Thus novels today stink and are too caught up in the high-brow theories of our great colleges and boring to read.

The reason so few good presidential candidates are running is becausing of atomic testing when the baby boomers grew up.

I should not have been let into Harvard. But what do I know, I'm just a skeptic.