A Hundred Different Harvards

As first-years, we are said to wonder whether we were the admissions office’s big mistake. It’s only later that we realize the better question is whether Harvard was our mistake. Commencement, perhaps, should be the time when we can best answer that question. But at the senior events meant to bind us forever to each other and to our alma mater, I see more than a handful of people I’ve never met, who spent their time here doing things I’ve never tried. In the end, I can only say that there is no single Harvard, and no easy way of answering the question, “Was it worth it or not?”

Plenty of pieces answer these questions by praising or criticizing a familiar set of Harvard features. We hear plaudits for the diverse student body and the wealth of extracurricular groups, and attacks on the Core, the Administrative Board and the advising system. These pieces celebrate or criticize the few factors that shape the College experience for all of us, and I generally agree with their concerns.

But when we focus too much on those few overarching elements, we miss the fact that they—for each of us—probably weren’t the most important things about our four years here. Few students’ experiences are defined primarily by the administrative bugaboos about which we complain. And unless the Last Chance Dance or Junior Parents’ Weekend is your favorite Harvard memory, the magic moments that made things worthwhile for you probably weren’t shared by the whole class. As a result, even as we are besieged by merchandise and events that celebrate class unity—buy a fleece, hear Bono’s speech, eat at our barbecue—for most of us, the most important things about the College are individual, even private.

This, I think, is why I couldn’t tell high-school me whether I was right to come to Harvard, or tell first-year me whether I’ve done the right things once here. In high school, our options are limited, and we can pursue every activity for which we have an aptitude or ambition.

But Harvard is different. This school periodically swallows entire neighborhoods of Boston, and boasts hundreds of student organizations from Education for Action to Zalacain. We aren’t all members of the same teams, groups and classes. We don’t even all share the same zip code. Your Harvard is different from mine.

Perhaps more importantly, each of our Harvards is different from the other Harvards we could have experienced. There are plenty of open houses that I skipped because they lacked free pizza, plenty of students I never met just because the Quad seems so far away, plenty of courses I never took because they met at 10 a.m.

Each one of us probably could have lived a number of happy lives here, choosing schoolwork rather than newspaper work, politics over performance, and so on. At Harvard, we can’t do everything. Instead, we make choices.

Those choices—even the ones made with a passing glance at a mini-calendar during our opening days—seem now so big that their impact is hard to fathom. How would super-studious me have compared to my present self? What about Crimson Dance Team me? The version of myself with a favorite chair in Lamont or the one with a favorite shortcut to the MAC are so different that I cannot fully imagine the impact my choices here—extracurricular, social, academic—have had.

Gone, too, is the easy crutch of achievement in evaluating these choices. Everyone here has succeeded at something and failed at something, so we lack the instant validation of being First Place Everything, or the equally clear feedback of abject failure.

So here, in the end, is my proposal for what makes us all members of the Class of 2001. Crimson Dance Team and Crimson newspaper, Cabot or Kirkland, we have all led different Harvard lives that may have deeply enriched each other’s, or may never have intersected. I cannot say which of the many versions of a College career is the better one. But in the end, beyond the Veritas fleeces, what we all share is that here we have chosen one or another version of ourselves. Forget about the Core; our Harvard careers and our own identities have been the consequences of our choices. For better or worse, Harvard was what we made of it.

Rachel P. Kovner ’01, a social studies concentrator in Quincy House, was an executive editor of The Crimson in 2000.