Rewriting the Tales of a Harvard Board

Each spring, the ballot for the Harvard University Board of Overseers regales us with formulaic tales of career success, celebrity, and wealth. In good Harvard spirit, short narratives are crafted around stories of service and charity. While there are exceptions, the marketing I suspect can too easily belie the careful path taken to recognition and position, and the definitions employed to count “service” seem generously broad. And lest her students and alumni think that life after Harvard is all chairmanships, championships, cabinet appointments, technology buy-outs, and estate planning, the University would do its community a very great and real service by raising a ballot inclusive of her single moms, stay-at-home dads, small-scale artists, struggling poets, middle school teachers, and those whose record of service is truly central to their lives, with all its risk, returns, sacrifice and financial consequence.

There is a stubborn pattern by which we bestow honors on those who have meticulously plotted their careers, and one might suspect in many cases more for enrichment, advancement, and celebrity than for service. More and more, it seems we’ve surrendered to an outcome that turns on how the game is played — on the attention sought on social media platforms and the relentless pursuit of connections, awards and fellowships with their multiplying power of celebrity. The very great pity in this, and the disservice to Harvard in this case, is that there are so many great minds and hearts still within her reach but quieter in their pursuits, who are too busy doing and serving to be plotting, climbing and promoting — and whose contributions to her direction and reach could be incalculable.

Let’s champion our alumni, or at least include them, whose service is truly central to their lives, and an indissoluble mark of their character and deep personal commitment — those otherwise unsung, working behind the front lines of our cities, our schools and our world, not on occasion through Board appointments and weekend volunteering, but as the core thread of their lives. Harvard may not know many of these alumni because they’re not in the halls of her clubs or on her travel tours, or at her high donor tables, but that’s reason enough to make a change.

We can rebalance the honor roll. Harvard is such a truly remarkable institution, and her alumni are as rich in diversity, cause, contribution — and accomplishment — as our admissions themselves evidenced. While this year’s ballot had some original additions and the candidates are to be warmly congratulated on their success, too little seems to change by way of the profile of the ballot.

Let’s extend a hand further out. The honor of serving on Harvard’s Board should not default to being the crowning jewel of a tireless, well-crafted ascent to position, power, influence or wealth. It can be something more meaningful — it can be an unsought honor, and one that lifts a life of service, whether to family, community or charity, to the recognition it deserves. We can bestow the honor on someone whose brand is an accident of merit and not a strategy of celebrity.

Life after Harvard is beautiful, and hard. There is grief, loss, struggle, illness and disappointment. And for those who have committed their professional lives to service, there is the weight of bearing witness and the sobering reality of its demands. Let’s have the courage to write the real bios, the ones that tell the fuller story. Our lives are a testament to the strength and depth of our spirit, and our capacity to allow forth the gifts buried in life’s inevitable loss and hardship. Harvard’s resumes can be hard to distinguish between, but her real bios are not. And in their honesty and vulnerability, Harvard can find her best inspiration.

Elizabeth Walker ’93 is an officer of her Harvard class. She works with international nonprofits.