Stuck in the Tower

There has been a disturbing trend in recent articles on this page--from Beth Stewart's detailing her unconscionable agenda (Feb. 3), to Tom Cotton's cheering selfishness, apathy and shortsightedness (Column, Feb. 18) to Josh Kaufman's describing our campus as appropriately the training ground of the social elite (Column, Feb. 20), columnists have been embracing the ivory tower we call home.

As these writers detail their plans for improvement of the tower and tout the merits of seclusion and elitism, we cannot help but imagine Harvard students as complacent Rapunzels who have stopped dreaming of escape. The beautiful long hair that might have been our connection to the outside world became annoying, so with short hair and apparently empty conscience we have boarded the windows and plan to spend our days eating grapes, playing squash, writing Core papers and waging the good fight for universal keycard access.

Of course, as Cotton points out, not everyone is a complacent Rapunzel: the baneful progressives keep stomping around the tower demanding that the windows be unboarded, insisting that we think about people outside of the tower and remember that we are the lucky few. We would like to point out that not only do we need to notice the world outside of our decadent tower, but we need to recognize that it is fundamentally impossible to exclude oneself from society for four years of college. To pretend to do so is entirely unjustifiable.

Beth Stewart has argued time and time again that the Undergraduate Council, which has only a limited amount of "political capital" in negotiations with the administration, should focus on campus issues--issues where ostensibly students agree and the council can effect real change. This seems like a nice enough idea: let's pretty up this tower of ours. We pay well over a hundred thousand dollars to go to school here; we should be able to wrap our grapes in two-ply toilet paper and eat them in the back seat of student-accessible vans. Well, that is one use of "political capital."

Here is another: maybe we should think about people other than ourselves. Maybe we should realize that we are some of the most privileged people in society and stop worrying about cable TV.

This is not to say that there are not campus issues which deserve the attention of the UC, student groups, and individual students; issues like faculty diversity and campus safety need to be addressed (and to the extent that Stewart makes progress on these concerns, we applaud her). But they need to be addressed because they speak to broader societal problems that demand our attention.

Stewart's focus on campus luxuries is unjustifiable, and there is not a modicum of merit in working for universal keycard access, van accessibility and cable TV when Harvard students already have nicer living conditions than 99 percent of the world ever will. We take issue with the notion that the supposed impotence of the council somehow justifies selfishness, shortsightedness and seclusion.

In "One Cheer for Apathy" Tom Cotton assured us that it was not so much a belief of ineffectuality that renders students apathetic but a devotion to the experience of a liberal education and the selfless pursuit of medical school admission or a Wall Street position that leads students to "prudently choose their education over activism." The notion that a secluded liberal education is valuable, or even possible, stuns us. The proposal that one is best educated by avoiding ideology, activism, and community activity is patently ridiculous. It is a presumptuous fallacy to suggest that "education" is only attainable in wood-paneled classrooms and textbooks.

Ask any science concentrator if they learn more in lecture or lab; ask anyone who has ever volunteered at a homeless shelter if their experiences with inner-city economic realities were covered in Ec10. It is only by active engagement with the world that one becomes "educated" in any real sense of the word.

Further, the notion that sitting in a Harvard dorm room studying 15 hours a day (as Cotton noted Thomas Jefferson allegedly did) prepares most students for anything other than a life of elitism and inaction is profoundly faulted. Where is the logic in supposing that people who contentedly spend four years doing nothing but classwork will suddenly rise from their undergraduate stupor and be ready (or qualified) to change the world? And where is the logic in supposing that it is possible to extricate oneself from society for long enough to graduate summa?

To us, the notion that a liberal education can be gated into the Yard and boxed off into neat slots on a weekly planner is nonsensical. Just as anyone with an iota of intellectual curiosity does not "stop" educating herself after getting a degree, anyone who is a member of society (as we all are) does not "stop" participating in civic life for the purposes of academics. For our own education we should not, and in reality, we cannot: we are still participating in the economy every time we buy a textbook; we are still participating in democracy every time we do or do not cast a vote; we are still making a political statement every time we purchase a product made by Nabisco or Nike.

One simply cannot disengage from the outside world selectively; this is an all-too-easy-to-believe ivory tower delusion. Just as the food in the dining hall is not really free, and "dining services flexibility" means that more employees go home later, our position as college students does not render us innocuous or ineffectual in the non-college world. Apathy cannot be justified on the basis of academic demands or career aspirations.

Harvard is supposedly a school which will pump us full of the skills and credentials that can be used to make the world a better place. Taking advantage of all that Harvard has to offer is a great idea, but ensconcing oneself in a tower of elitism, academia and complacency is not.

We are not asking Harvard students to ignore their theses in favor of protests or to skip lectures to help out those less fortunate than themselves. Instead we are asking that students keep an eye on the big picture our educational institution is embedded in, ask what this education is for and about after all, and participate in the broader community in any way possible. Or, at the very least, that they stop trying to polish the walls of the ivory tower and pretend we can be both uber-privileged and righteous.

Andrea E. Johnson '98-'99, an environmental science and public policy concentrator, and Abigail R. Branch '98, a social studies concentrator, live in Quincy House. Their column appears on alternate Wednesdays.