The Real Purpose of Harvard

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Matt Damon '96 and Ben Affleck have decided to start their own production company, Pearl Street Productions. All actors want more creative control over their projects than they receive, and Matt and Ben have reached an enviable position that gives them enough Hollywood clout to make Pearl Street Productions a success.

But what is interesting is who will be sharing in their success. Matt and Ben haven't just taken the name "Pearl Street" from the carefree youth they spent with their Cantabrigian friends; they've also taken the friends. Damon and Affleck have manned their new enterprise with old childhood friends, all of them young writers, directors and producers-to-be.

How much will Damon and Affleck's names really help these budding auteurs? According to director Kevin Smith in September's issue of Boston Magazine, "friendships with Affleck and Damon are good qualifications to do great work."

Friendship with Smith is a pretty good qualification in and of itself. Long ago, in a world that had never heard of Affleck or Damon, Kevin Smith delivered the Good Will Hunting script to one of Miramax's co-presidents, permitting the chain of events that led to an Oscar for both Affleck and Damon.

Well, sure, connections are important in Hollywood, you may be thinking. There, it's all about who you know, and who you can say you're friends with. In the real world, people don't grow up with Affleck and Damon, and "connections" are reserved for the the elite whose parents have already done the hard work of making friends in high places.

Guess again.

During the second semester of my first year here at Harvard, after the trauma of blocking had long past but still elicited a twinge of discomfort, conversation between my friends and I turned to the influence Annenberg dining hall had had in our lives. Why had Harvard decided to feed all 1600-plus first-years in the same cavernous dining hall? Didn't they realize how intimidating it was to walk in and have to sit with someone you barely knew from section because you couldn't find your roommates among the mass? Sure, it was fine now, but Annenberg had been no fun in the beginning.

I remember a fellow first-year I had just met shake her head at the foolishness of my friends and my questions. "Hello? It's not like I had to leave New Jersey in order to learn what I'm learning in my classes. All you need is a textbook and a video of the lectures. The reason they brought us all to Boston is so that we can meet each other. That's what we're really getting out of being here."

That's a jaded view of the commonly quoted phrase "most of the learning goes on outside of the classroom." But it's true in certain ways. Do you really want to know the criteria Harvard bases its acceptances on? In its unconsciously pretentious way, Harvard likes to say that it's betting on the future of its students. You may hear differently from your proctors, tutors and House Masters. But each member of the admissions committee will tell you that they care less about the grades you get here than about what you do with yourself after you graduate.

It is quite irritating to hear from non-Harvardians how the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in, especially because you always happen to hear it just after you pulled your second all-nighter and you still can't improve your solid C+ in Chem 20. For most, the difficulty in Harvard lies in getting either an A or a C, since both require rather extreme study habits. Come Commencement, practically no one will know anyone who failed out of Harvard.

That point made, most of you won't relate to the exclusively connections-based view of Harvard. "Uh, actually, my friends are my friends because I like them, and I'm learning things in my classes at Harvard that I never even dreamed were possible in high school," is the thought that I hope is drifting through your head right now. The majority of Harvard students don't make friends to beef up their future Filofaxes, although by the end of freshman week, you certainly will have met a few of your fellow classmates who clearly do.

Don't worry, the visceral disgust you feel at the artificiality of some of your classmates is a commonly shared emotion. Nothing is more repulsive than letting the concept of connections dominate your life here, and since people can sense when you're being artificial and when you're being sincerely friendly, that approach backfires more often than not.

However, keep in mind that a little mutual back-scratching won't hurt your future prospects whether you decide to go to law school, get involved in medicine, or dabble in I-banking, which sums up 75 percent of your classmates' future careers.

If you don't know someone who writes down the names of everyone they meet at Harvard on an index card and files it for future use, you will by the time you graduate. And you know what? That "someone" probably won't be a particularly bad person. Cordially friendly to everyone, always ready for a chat, that name-filer will enjoy your company and also happen to note you as a future contact. You don't need to be a cut-throat, uncaring person subsumed by ambition to take advantage of one of Harvard's best resources: the people you'll meet here.

Okay, I admit I wouldn't keep files of index cards with the names of all of my Harvard acquaintances. And I might think it was a little weird if one of my friends did. But I no longer consider it strange that an old high school friend and member of the class of 2003 approached me, and unable to contain her enthusiasm at her recent acceptance, whispered to me conspiratorially "I'm a member of the club now!"

At the time, I thought, what club? The members of my high school class who came to Harvard weren't particularly close to one another. And it appeared even less possible that she had meant that everyone at Harvard was part of a club, because the average student probably knows less than 2 percent of Harvard undergraduates by name. I dismissed her as someone overly caught up in the inherently exclusionary nature of Harvard. Once she arrived, I felt sure, her sense that Harvard was an exclusive club would evaporate as she realized how decentralized the community was.

Now, I've faced the fact that my original assessment was slightly naive. Going to Harvard doesn't make you better than anyone else, and it certainly doesn't make you part of a superior group of beings. Yet it would be foolish to dismiss the influence many of the people you meet here can have in your life. Not everyone can grow up with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Not everyone here will become the Matt Damon of marketing, or the Ben Affleck of corporate lawyers. But many of us here will fulfill the golden future that admissions saw would arrive in their magical ball. And it won't be because of Harvard, for the most part.

Doubtless, most people who succeed upon graduation from Harvard would have done just as well graduating from another university. But Harvard does give us the chance to meet one another, and as you go through the typical college experience of partying, studying, and having late-night chats about Wittgenstein and existentialism, do keep that in mind.

Breezy H. Tollinger '02, a Crimson editor, is an english concentrator in Currier House.