Harvard's Gift

At Convocation, nearly four years ago, I and 1,600 other bewildered members of the Class of 1999 received the following message (in not quite these words, of course):

"Welcome to Harvard University--an institution with a wealth of resources and possibilities you could only have dreamed of until now. We could have selected an equally good class from the pool of applicants we rejected. But we didn't. We chose you. Go, then, and fulfill our hopes for you; take advantage of every opportunity you can by whichever means you deem necessary (within reason, please), and when you're done and you've seen how fantastic we really are, give us money as a show of appreciation, so we can continue to deliver this message for another three and a half centuries. Good luck, and don't cry. It might get worse before it gets better, but you'll thank us in the end."

Today, on this sunny morning in June, that end--which once seemed a point too far in the distance even to consider--has actually arrived. And Harvard was right: Those of us graduating today are thankful to this mighty institution for providing us with the framework to grow and learn together.

But not everyone who stood in Tercentenary Theater four years ago has the pleasure of standing there again today. My classmates, Sarah Theresa Craig; Harvard Clarence Nabrit Stephens; Deshaun Raymond Hill; and David L. Okrent graduated from life too early. For me and many of my peers, their tragic deaths were a first experience with mortality. Experiencing their loss helped me to realize that while I may have entered college an eager-eyed teenager, I exit, an adult.

We exit, adults. That means we gain a new freedom, a freedom both daunting and exhilarating: to create a life outside the safety of the institutional college structure. It also means that we assume new responsibilities. One responsibility falls to me and to my generation universally: to accept, and embrace, human difference.

The failure to accept human difference leads to the current disaster in Kosovo. The failure to accept human difference leads to civil war in Rwanda. The failure to accept human difference leads to Matthew Shepard's death in Laramie, Wyo.; James Byrd Jr.'s murder in Jasper, Texas; and Amadou Diallo's gunning down in New York City.

Spending four years at Harvard--studying, living, socializing, with a diverse student body--teaches that the universal responsibility I am discussing here is not a burden. Rather, it is an opportunity.

The Class of 1999 was the first Harvard class to experience randomized House life, 70 years after President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, created the House system in order to bring disparate groups of Harvard students together. Pursuing Lowell's aim, for the first time we did not choose our neighbors. They were chosen for us by lottery.

Although randomization has its foes and its flaws, the program instituted with our class reflects the kind of life we ought to strive for as we enter a world much more diverse than Harvard: a life in which we will not discriminate among human beings on the basis of skin color, sexual orientation or religion; a life in which we will live, eat and send our children to school with persons of all creeds and colors; a life in which we will think of future generations before ourselves and value human variety above homogeneity.

On this last Harvard Commencement of the 20th century, the United States stands at a singular position of power and prosperity. But we, the Class of 1999, must do more than simply profit for ourselves. We have the mandate and, indeed, the privilege, to be universal in our thinking and our actions: to embrace the difference that make us human.

Now the end of our experience is upon us. The world awaits. But before we go, let us take a last look around, at the many faces of Harvard. We are better people than we were four years ago--because we have learned to see ourselves in each other. That is Harvard's gift. We must keep it with us, always.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99, a social studies concentrator in Leverett House, was editorial chair of The Crimson in 1998.