Bubblegum Machine

My first encounter with Harvard was neither at my father’s 20th reunion nor my older brother’s move-in day. I didn’t read about the college in a book or hear about it in school. Instead, Harvard first came alive to me as I was glued to my suburban Ohio console television set, watching Zach Morris and Jessie Spano take their SATs on the popular teenage sitcom Saved By the Bell. Zach, Slater, Screech and the gang tricked the stuffy admissions officer into admitting Jessie, only to realize over burgers and fries at the Max, that Harvard wasn’t the place for them.

Since that day, I wanted Harvard much like I wanted any other brand: Gap jeans, Nike sneakers and anything else that I saw on SBTB and the commercials in between. For a girl who watched a lot of television, Harvard was a ticket into a faraway land where everyone wore navy blazers with gold buttons and Brendan Fraser look-alikes frolicked around the Yard with drafts of government theses in tow. Not that I knew what theses were—I had only heard about them in With Honors, a film starring Fraser as a hunky Harvard student and Joe Pesci as a homeless man living in the basement of Widener Library.

And what does all of this mean? Harvard obviously has a permanent place in pop culture, for better (Good Will Hunting) or for worse (How High). But there remains a more complex question—is pop culture worth studying at Harvard? As teens become increasingly saturated with all things pop—music, celebrity, fashion, advertising, movies—should we embrace the pop psychology of Dr. Phil as we study Freud? Should we stop casting a collective frown upon those students in section who draw references from The Wonder Years or the MTV Video Music Awards?

My answer is yes. Every year Harvard alums go on to write, produce, and act in sitcoms, work for popular magazines like Rolling Stone, ascend through the ranks of Madison Avenue advertising agencies, evolve into media moguls, and caricature their former professors on The Simpsons. The Institute of Politics (IOP) offers a coveted Director’s Internship at MTV, combining pop and politics in a way that makes it one of the most popular and competitive internships offered to Harvard students. The Af-Am department operates an extensive hip-hop archive; and students experiment with advertising and fashion design.

Six months before an extreme close-up shot of Larry Summers graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the publication featured another in-your-face male on its title page: rapper Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. If these two figures stand side by side as equals, can’t we analyze pop culture within the walls of the ivory tower?

We have only just begun an intellectual dialogue that considers the enormous impact of pop culture on our society. American Studies Professor Lizabeth Cohen recently published her work Consumer’s Republic, a massive volume that examined post-war levels of consumption and their detrimental effects on society. Government Professor Robert D. Putnam cites pop culture vehicles like television and the Internet as reasons why the fabric of community in America has unwoven. Former economics and women’s studies professor Juliet Schor offered a popular class titled “Shop ’til You Drop.” An English tutorial close reads Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, while the African American Studies department offers courses in hip-hop, and English 178x, “American Protest Literature,” studies Tupac Shakur. Vin Diesel is cited as a “Byronic Hero” in British Romantic Poetry, and Linguistics professor Alice Jardine explores why we “Like Ike” but “Love Lucy” in her class on 1950’s popular culture. The evolution from Marilyn to Madonna to Britney fascinates us as we continue to find echoes in pop that resonate with the more intellectual world.

Though I doubt I’ll be listening to Justin Timberlake in Literature and Arts B anytime soon, I am pleased with the steadily increasing and more readily available opportunities to study one of the strongest forces that has shaped our lives. Harvard students are undeniably becoming a more (pop)-cultured group, embracing Bach alongside Beyonce. And maybe even watching a few episodes of Saved By the Bell on the side.

—Crimson Arts columnist Lisa M. Puskarcik can be reached at puskarc@fas.harvard.edu.