Seeking a Diversity Of Career Plans

It didn't come as a shock when I found out that I wasn't speaking at this year's Commencement. There were two minor barriers standing in my way: I didn't apply and I'm a sophomore.

Still, the sticky hot summer air and the freshly groomed sod in Harvard Yard tell me that graduation, in all of its manicured magnificence, is soon upon us. There are a few things I should have liked to have said along side the University's brass and opposite fellow Harvard students come to celebrate the glories of the day. Here's an excerpt from a Commencement address that will not be:

Diversity is a term bandied about our campus with the reckless abandon that literary scholars toss around "intertextuality" or "gender" as a verb. We chair committees, establish organizations and plan events with the expressed purpose of bringing about greater "diversity" in the student population or the faculty. Diversity in this sense translates into a greater percentage of minority, female or homosexual members in the Harvard community at large.

I do not reject the deep-seated promptings of the diversity-crusaders so much as their methodology. I too would like the Harvard faculty to look a little bit less like the Elks club from some New Hampshire hamlet. But I am not so bent on this notion of diversity that I would be willing to short-circuit strictly meritocratic hiring procedures in order to bring it about.

The current dearth of Black academics at Harvard is bound up with a legacy of American racism. The sins of fathers are, indeed, visited upon children. Yet we would do better merely to confront that ugly truth than to delude ourselves into thinking that the total erasure of past wrongs can come about with a new administrative agenda.

When all is said and done, Harvard has done relatively well with the Class of '94, in terms of bringing about diversity. As I look out onto Tercentenary Theater this afternoon I marvel at the stripes and colors that we, the students of Harvard College, represent. Not even the prismatic hues of the academic robes can quite capture our endless diversity. While our ratios might be statistically skewed, we could never be confused with the graduating class of Harvard-Radcliffe a generation ago.

But in another sense of diversity--I would argue a more urgent sense--we are hopelessly lacking. Though our bodies are dissimilar, our souls are of a kind. Even as we stand here with our infinitely variegated faiths, ethnicities and sexualities, we also stand here as a community overwhelmingly composed of only three basic constituencies: future lawyers, doctors and business executives.

In America of 1994, what you do for a living--how you spend the bulk of the waking hours of your day--is far more central to your identity than the color of your skin or the name of your house of worship. And in this crucial regard, Harvard College is the site of a massive failure in bringing about diversity among the students on campus.

How can it be that the students of the Class of '94, who represent every state in our union, whose politics cover every last inch on the right-left continuum, nonetheless agree that health care, lawsuits and investment banking are the only viable ways to lead their lives? If it is true that we at Harvard represent the elitest of the elite, where then are our next generation of painters and professors, engineers and editors, farmers and soldiers?

There are, undoubtedly, some empirical explanations for this phenomenon, for surely at one point it was less of a foregone conclusion that a Harvard-Radcliffe graduate would look to the trinity of law, medicine and business for life-long employment. Some argue that we have witnessed the evolution of a so-called "New Class," with a bias towards hyper-professionalism. Or, we could see the shrunken job market as the primary source of this trend toward steady, lucrative employment.

But beyond the thin veil of social science, there looms an ominous moral predicament. Harvard students are no longer leaders, but followers. At the time we graduate, we do not have the will to confront a tired and hardened world with our youthful vigor. We are non-confrontationalists, consensus builders. We want nothing more than to please the men and women who currently wield the real-world's power, whether they go by the name boss or parent. In short, there is a general spirit of conformist malaise about Cambridge these days.

Lest those of you who know me accuse me of advocating allout cultural revolution, I must qualify. I do not equate non-conformity with Volkswagen vans, Maoism or World Music. Joining the priesthood or the Peace Corps, a farm or the Foreign Service are all valid rejections of the increased homogeneity of the Harvard community. The pocketbook might suffer, the parents might moan. Individualism does come at a price.

There can be no legislation to bring about this diversity, no policy from on high. University Hall can only assure that Harvard classes have a cosmetic diversity, a medley of colors and cultures that while important, is often only skin deep. As for the real diversity--the real diversity must transpire from within.