More to Life Than Harvard

More than ever before, dear Harvard is telling its 6,000-plus undergraduates to get out of here. The Ivy gates, as exclusive and foreboding as they are to outsiders, often prove more suffocating to those inside, and the administration is doing its best to encourage its undergraduates to forsake Lamont for Latvia and the Coop for Cape Town.

They tell us to traipse the planet, learn languages and intern in rural villages—all in the name of a “meaningful” study abroad experience. What, though, constitutes a “meaningful” abroad experience? Is it a five-week summer program in Rio de Janeiro that comes conveniently with a Harvard stamp of approval and a corresponding price tag?

This year’s Harvard-in-Rio program lasted five weeks and cost 5,500 dollars—a price that covers almost a full year’s rent in Brazil’s cidade maravilhosa. Students are shuffled into Pontífica Universidade Católica (PUC), Rio’s private university that caters to the city’s affluent population, meaning that the program is often devoid of the striking diversity so emblematic of Rio.

Only 1 percent of the United States’ undergraduates study abroad; over 75 percent of them pick a program that lasts fewer than 12 weeks, and so Harvard’s “study abroad problem,” if I might call it that, is also a national issue. And even though study abroad is increasing, in a large part thanks to Congress’ 2006 push for students to go abroad, many cram programs into summer vacations, eager to experience international education but unwilling to sacrifice an academic semester in the States.

Harvard is as much—if not more—a culprit as any other institution, its students so dedicated to extracurricular activities and internships that the prospect of departing Harvard for a precious semester is more frightening than thrilling. Close friends of mine asked me quite seriously if going abroad would be worth “missing out on” a semester at Harvard. Several others asked me what harm would be done to my “leadership positions” if I skipped town for seven months. There is genuine fear of studying abroad at Harvard—a fear that no institutional changes or innovative study abroad programs can ameliorate without a marked shift in attitude by Harvard’s own students.

We treat our extracurricular and academic obligations as jobs, somehow forgetting in the process that we are in our late teens or early twenties and responsible (perhaps for the last time) to no one but ourselves. We are so eager to be involved on campus and in the classroom that we forget there is an entire world in which to be involved, one that makes the basement classrooms of CGIS and the panels on international affairs look pitifully inadequate. Our resources are great and our faculty superb, but no lecture on Latin American social movements can compare to watching the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo march outside the Casa Rosada, crying for their children who disappeared more than 25 years ago.

There is an incredible worth to international education and experience that cannot be found or generated in Harvard Yard. That Harvard now offers a wealth of popular summer programs does indeed testify to the growing legitimacy of studying abroad at Harvard, but that students would prefer five weeks in Spain to 25 remains befuddling and, on some level, sad. Imagine truncating the Harvard semester after five weeks during the first two months of freshman year. These accelerated and often isolated programs bring a Harvard mentality to a radically different place. We cannot bring Harvard to Bombay, Barcelona or Buenos Aires, and attempts to do so are stunting to both the place and the participant.

One cannot learn a city or even try to understand a place—much less a language—in five weeks. It took me over two months to fully grasp the public transportation system in Buenos Aires. Even after five months, I still found myself susceptible to the city’s secrets and idiosyncrasies—secrets that do not reveal themselves in the intensive language classes and all-day curriculum of Harvard Summer School programs. The notion that one can experience a city and a culture in five whirlwind weeks of language classes and “cultural” outings is a prototypical Harvard mentality, akin to us writing 20-page papers in one night and squeezing in meals and gym time between sections and meetings. We want to study abroad, but we want to scribble it in the corner of our planners along with any number of other responsibilities.

It is easy to blame it all on Harvard, a place quite often accused of anglophilia and academic self-centeredness. Students cite strenuous tutorial requirements, an inflexible core curriculum and demanding concentration courses that must be taken in succession as prohibitive to studying abroad. But Harvard students continually stay home—perhaps because it is the safe option, but also because there is a certain desperate fear that academic life elsewhere is less challenging, less intense, and less interesting. This is not only untrue, but it is an insidious subplot at a university whose alumni continually go on to affect the world’s course in powerful and direct ways.

We are witnessing the to-and-fro of an ancient institution at battle with itself and its students, as Harvard tries the hardest it ever has to get its undergraduates out of famed Harvard Yard for a mere one semester out of eight. The Ivy gates are indeed more permeable than ever, thanks to great initiative by the Office of International Programs.

In the end, however, Harvard students must be willing to leave them.



Aidan E. Tait ’08, a Crimson sports writer, is a Latin American studies concentrator in Eliot House.