The Harvard Standard

In the world of benchmarks, there is Carbon-14. There is the 30-year United States Treasury bond. Is there also the Harvard undergraduate career?

An Eli friend and I recently found ourselves on tour at Cornell University, the western outpost of the Ivy League. As two college students in a gaggle of high-school seniors and their parents practically beside themselves in the "Is this the right place?" soul searching, it was a chance to go incognito and try to remember what it is we do and why people seem to fawn so easily. ("That's a Harvard student," I recall a mother telling her daughter one morning my first year as I rushed half-awake to breakfast. Her daughter wrote it down dutifully. It must have read like a field study: "Harvard student. Stubbly.")

We almost blew our cover on the first challenge. "What are your interests?" the chirpy tour guide asked, adjusting his hat while walking uphill backwards. I had long ago turned in interests for a concentration, but I managed to mumble something about history and he passed on to the eager high school students. I was in.

As we toured the campus, we heard the superstitions, the campus firsts, the college history. I maintained low profile. I noticed a dangerous pattern developing, however: there we some things I just had to giggle at. A giggle isn't the normal tour noise--a well-oiled tour guide can time the laughs, the oohs and the aahs--so needless to say I caught a few suspicious looks as we turned the corners of the pseudo-Gothic buildings and walked up yet another hill.

I was giggling at the culture of the Ivy League Tour Lies. They aren't exactly lies, but rather selective descriptions, the sort of speech that gets people to buy the things they never needed, and, in its supreme form, to buy things they didn't even want. In the college world, these are large, impersonal classes at any level that you somehow feel privileged to join. At Harvard, Yale or any of these places, the grim reality of a 700-person introductory class with the professor far in the distance and a group of relatively unresponsive TF's becomes an unfortunate reality, but for someone to be actually touting the size of the biggest classes--and claiming that professors are simply willing and able to have you come to office hours no matter what the level of the course--seemed a pleasant fiction. This was just a small section of the tour, alongside a discussion of writing seminars and thesis advising and other truly responsive pieces of the undergraduate career, but the concept of boasting class girth brought on a giggle.

One unfamiliar section of the tour script, by Harvard standards, was the social scene speech: Greek life engaged "only" one third of the campus, we were informed, "so you can see that it doesn't control it." This seemed a particularly strange part of the shpiel, though the high-school students seemed to absorb it with no noticeable resistance. As a Harvard student I am by no means an expert on fraternity and sorority life, but if you could get a third of the Harvard students to do anything it would cause significant ripples. The closest examples would be Ec 10's effect on test scheduling or the Krokodiloes' concert on your Saturday night plans: each probably sucks away a sixth of the campus and even your most sheltered communist-anarchist music-hating philosophy concentrator will feel the effects.

All in all, the tour seemed what one could expect until we reached the athletic fields, and there my education began. "Harvard is our big rival in all the sports," I was informed, "though especially in hockey." He related how opposing teams got frozen fish and newspapers thrown at them on the ice, and how this was all great fun, especially against Harvard, and that a win against Harvard can make any team's season. Harvard's football, soccer and hockey teams always draw the crowds to help Cornell prevail, he said.

Now, I consider myself a relatively well-connected Harvard student and I must say I can't remember any ballyhoo about Cornell. I have not attended any hockey games--a fault I must live with every day and will mend in the winter--but I've been to football and soccer and field hockey and try to stay informed via these pages, and I can't say I remember a Harvard-Cornell rivalry per se. It reminds me of the morning I woke up in the Yard to John Harvard painted green and the Dartmouth band shouting and dancing around it. It turns out, I was told by a Dartmouth student in a less ecstatic moment, that there was a "big" Harvard-Dartmouth rivalry and they were just doing their part.

Apart from the Harvard-Yale charade, to see whose tailgate can get more champagne and more erudite people and big bucks, I actually can't remember any Harvard rivalry--no matter how many fish you throw at me. In fact, there must be some sort of Kafkaesque element to showing up to play a road game to fans eagerly throwing trout and speaking of a great rivalry you can't quite recall.

It is distressing, really, that there is such a top-to-bottom reliance on Harvard as the Ivy League nemesis--must they really compare themselves to Harvard? Can't a university wake up in the morning, look at itself in mirror, and (to quote the ancient semi-comedic television past), declare "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me"? Perhaps the US News and World Report has eliminated this forever, but why the constant competition?

The answer was my tour: comparison is at the heart of the high-school senior's reality. Yet is Harvard necessarily the best point of comparison? Cornell has a lot to brag about that Harvard cannot touch: a coeducational policy that stretches from its founding; a healthy mix of pre-professional and liberal arts students, including hotel-school students; and a rural environment with beautiful gorges, waterfalls and tracts of forest. There is a proud ROTC heritage here and a supercomputer, a distinct architecture and the continued imprint of Ezra Cornell's educational ideals. Frankly, Cornell has a lot to say for itself, without the constant Harvard comparisons. Does the comparison fall in the Ithaca forest if no one in Cambridge hears the sound?

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. This summer he is a factotum ("one who does everything") for a Telluride Association Summer Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.