No Intellectuals Need Apply

It's time we, the student body, write a collective letter to our friends at Williams or Swarthmore, Wesleyan or Amherst. It doesn't have to be long, just enough to admit the truth: Liberal-arts colleges, you win. You possess the nation's most innovative minds, the most intellectual student body. You are the stomping grounds for the great thinkers of the next millennium. We, Harvard, will stop trying to lord over you, stop saying that we are better or smarter, because it just isn't true. You can out-think us any day of the week.

There. Once that is said, we can all go on with being more honestly what we are--not intellectuals.

Don't get me wrong: Harvard students can be, and often are, great. They just aren't intellectuals. Sure, that first night the entire dorm gathered in somebody's common room and shared a bunch of ideas about what college was supposed to be, about where they were from and what they thought was really important, but the minute placement tests came along, let alone classes and extracurriculars, everyone was holed up in their room, hard at work or hard at play, and the great intellectual college conversations you had dreamed of became the thing of nostalgia and viewbooks.

It is probably important to define what I mean by intellectuals. I mean people who have a tendency to answer questions with questions and to think not inside or outside the box as much as about the box itself. The intellectual may not get the recruiting job or the place in the U.S. Senate, but he or she may win a MacArthur Prize or be invited to Sweden for a hefty award down the line. Many of you may be recoiling in disgust, but if a good philosophical conversation interests you and you can't find the right conversation partner, then you know what sort of intellectual I mean is missing from Harvard.

In some ways, it's the entire Harvard attitude. For example, on other campuses current events matter. People begin statements "when I was watching the news..." or "as I just read in the Globe...." Dinner conversations can be about reports on the increase in dual AIDS-hepatitis C cases or the assassination attempt on a member of the Palestinian National Council, to quote some of last week's news that has gone unnoticed and unmentioned. On other campuses, people leave plays, concerts and especially speeches charged up, ready to fight out their beliefs and talk about how they felt challenged or inspired. Here, people mumble, "yeah, that was good," before they turn back to thoughts on how much work there is left to do tonight.

Harvard seems populated with people I would fit into two large groups, which have some overlap: the leaders and the hard workers.

The leaders are often Harvard's pride and those students most easily confused with intellectuals. They found groups, they take on massive projects, they organize and coordinate large student activities from the Hasty Pudding to Project HEALTH to the IOP. They work long hours, put in incredible amounts of effort and make important changes in the quality of life for Harvard students and the surrounding communities, but leadership alone does not make an intellectual. These leaders could enthusiastically talk you under the table with plans for new improvements and new programs but are just as unlikely to know why it matters what they are doing. They work with like-minded students but might not be able to convince a disinterested party why, on a deep philosophical level, they are adding anything more to life than an inveterate slacker.

Which brings us to the next category: the hard workers, probably the most deeply anti-intellectual group at Harvard. Some work hard in their classes and can be found at all hours at computer terminals or in the bio labs, and some work hard at not working: scheduling the perfect weekend, planning the cheapest way to hit Paris and Acapulco during reading period or beating the next level on the newest Nintendo game. These people are focused and do the work that gets the grade--or at least gets them by--but ask for their thoughts and their eyes glaze over.

Harvard does have some intellectuals. Each of these groups attract some, but in some ways it feels like a fluke. Given the hostile environment to real thinking, students become "politic."

The politic are those who, despite their feelings on an issue, "just don't want to get into it." Maybe they feel the exchange of ideas will leave them where they are anyway and just create tension in a rooming group or a friendship. "It's just not worth it," they think, and so they are willing to step back and keep their ideas to themselves. They can see Harvard isn't the place where each existential moment deserves its own observations, where "what it all means" might be as important as the bottom line.

The intellectual high school senior probably self-selects away from Harvard and toward schools like Swarthmore. Imagine what you would think of a student who showed up as a pre-frosh and asked when the last time you were up late struggling with Wittgenstein's theories of games or Weber's predictions for the future of civilization--not just writing a response paper after skimming half the book, but really considering the challenges posed by these thinkers. Imagine if they asked if the triumphs and catastrophes, big and small, we face every day, even if we rush by and pretend not to see them, grabbed you with a thought and would not let go. What would you say? If a pre-frosh came up to you and asked about what the true nature of good is, the most common student response would be something flippant like "not this conversation" and change the subject, more often than not to the chorus of "I have so much work."

Maybe the undifferentiated mass of "work" we always talk about is the real problem. Where is the "learning from discussions with others" touted in those viewbooks? Does anyone ever carry conversation beyond section? When is the last time you got into a discussion with a roommate over reading for a class you don't have in common, or even one you do have in common? Hey, when is the last time you talked about anything with your roommates? Harvard often seems like an intellectual wasteland.

There are some reliable exceptions, such as this editorial page, some study groups at the IOP, the extraordinary tutorial and the really rare Core section that may live up to its billing as a class about "approaches to knowledge." Yet they are few and far between and seem rather the exceptions that prove the rule.

So, Swarthmore, Williams, maybe even Yale and the University of Chicago, you win. The lesson here is clear enough: no intellectuals need apply.

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.