Our Harvard Moment

If you have been following the Crimson pieces that have rocked the Harvard community over the past few weeks, then like me, you might have had a realization: all of this—from advising (or a lack thereof) to mental health issues, problematic campus culture to the sexual assault climate survey results—is connected.

The question then becomes: Can our individual moments of realization become a collective one? Our Harvard moment.

To put these problems fully on the shoulders of our administration, I think, would be both unfair and irresponsible. It is true that the administration has, for a long time, failed to create the kind of support network and foster the kind of campus climate that is conducive to positive academic, social, and psychological spaces.

But as Paul Barreira, director of UHS, recently asked: “Should UHS,” and, for the sake of this argument, the administration more broadly, “be the only place that deals with students in distress, or should we be creating a community that is more supportive?”

What I also know to be true is that we, as a student body, are responsible for many of these distresses. We have, time and again, failed to create positive spaces, both with our actions (where we go out, how exclusive we make our social spaces, how we treat our classmates), and our inaction (what we’re able to overlook and who we choose not to worry about).

Sometimes we even ignore the people closest to us. This often occurs when we introduce the “work excuse,” something we’ve all both perpetrated and been victimized by. “I just have too much work,” we feel alright saying, when a friend is dealing with an emotional or personal crisis.

Maybe the stakes are low when your friend is just having a bad day. But when the stakes are higher, and we have neglected to take the steps necessary to foster supportive relationships and spaces, then we begin to see the results of this daily negligence manifest itself in “deeply troubling” survey results and unacknowledged and unfairly stigmatized “Harvard Conditions.”

I’m often asked, as I’m sure many of you are, whether I “like” Harvard. I can’t say for sure what your response is to this question, but, for me, there’s always a moment of hesitation before I answer. The fact that Harvard students—when asked whether they like Harvard—sometimes hesitate does not mean that Harvard is a "bad" place; to the contrary, it’s an incredible place with amazing resources for those able to reach out and take advantage. But my hesitation, and what I think might be the hesitation for other students, comes from a deeply problematic piece of Harvard’s culture that is just now being brought to the fore. Through a combination of administration indifference and our own inability to construct a safe and supportive community, we have not yet built a campus that is conducive to healthy and positive student life.

Yet the reason I am hopeful—the reason why this piece is not strictly a criticism—is that I think we are experiencing a rare moment — one of those times in which there is a swelling tide of collective experience and unmistakable evidence that something is just not right. The Sexual Assault survey; the brave and powerful pieces by Viviana I. Maymi, Rachel C. Talamo and many others; the extended deep dive into “The Harvard Condition” by Mariel A. Klein; and maybe most importantly, Luke Z. Tang’s death have all created enough of an emotional disturbance that we may have encountered a tipping point. This may be the moment that we turn Barreira’s promise of a few more trained mental health professionals into something far more substantial and long-lasting: a real culture shift that transforms our social interactions and our broader interactions with the academic environment of which we are all lucky to be a part.

There is no doubt that we now have the ear of an administration that has repeatedly come under fire for not extending that ear when we feel our input should be considered. We now have the ears of Harvard students as we try to cope, collectively, with the horrifying, but unsurprising, results of a damning sexual assault survey, and a sudden and tragic death.

To me, the question is not only how each of us can use our personal moments of reflection to improve the lives of those around us, but also how we take individual action and find the kind of systemic change that most of us, in varying degrees, thinks is necessary for a campus-wide culture shift. Does it mean we demand advising that better fits our needs? Absolutely. Does it mean that we begin to rethink the culture and social structure of our Houses? Probably. I can’t say that I have all the answers. But I do think it is clear that change, of all kinds, is becoming a must for our campus. Recently, a Crimson survey asked some of these questions—questions whose answers can begin to shape our collective response to the rapidly growing disillusionment and discontent with the institutions and spaces that we both inherited and created ourselves.

Our moment is now. I have, recently, become steadfast in my belief that we are the right student body, at the right time, to reach out and seize it.

Nick F. Barber '17, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Mather House.