Why Harvard?

Recently, a friend and I were debating the true value of a Harvard education (no, not the dollar cost). After much competent but inconclusive chin-wagging, I channeled my inner former University President Neil L. Rudenstine, mouthed some digression about cultivating global leaders, and hastened on to other topics. It got me through the evening, but weeks later the question still dogged me. Why attend?

Of course, no essay could really put this puzzle to bed. As I discovered over some weekends perusing the literature, uncertainty about the purpose of a college education tends to multiply the further one pursues the matter. To settle any question as subjective as “What is the meaning of college?” almost demands, in T.S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “a hundred visions and revisions.”

Still, as my friends from that strange, mostly happy time would attest, I never met an argument I didn’t like. And one as fraught as whether a Harvard education really is top-notch makes especially good grist for a bookish barroom back-and-forth at the Hong Kong restaurant (my measure of a good time). So, without any real hope of a nice, tidy answer, one possible account might go as follows.

In an age of thinning community commitments and pervasive loneliness, a Harvard degree tethers its recipient to a shared past and future through a time-tested transfer of culture between generations. Where this transfer sometimes manifests novel social and cultural uncertainties (W.E.B. Du Bois, Class of 1890, famously lamented “all the irony of my singing ‘Fair Harvard’” as a Black pupil in the College), it also helps to fashion a sense of continuity amid competing research interests, methods, and debates. This sense, ever nourished by a devoted faculty, is the seminal genius of our system, centering a sacred vision of tradition that, in the words of our fair school song, rises calmly “thro’ change and thro’ storm.”

All well and good, you say, but isn’t that story a bit rosy? Well, yes — very. Any undergrad could tell you the ways Harvard has changed since the Puritan guarding University Hall sent his first donation in the 1630s (if only he could see the endowment today!). There’s no more chapel requirement, no Indian College, no Massachusetts Bay Colony. Heck, much about Harvard has changed even since the 1930s — or the 1990s, for that matter. (I challenge all able-bodied undergraduates to swim 100 yards at the Malkin Athletic Center before graduation day.)

True, there have been windows of stability, even of conservative recoil, but I’d be lying if I didn't admit that the academy upon which the Class of ’27, the fourth in our history, is entering is worlds apart from the Harvard of yore.

Why then the pleasant fiction about continuity?

Well, because that was the Harvard I chose to attend, of course! As an undergraduate, I felt drawn to an idea — a myth, if you like — of tradition across the ages. I sought classes on the early Shakespeare plays, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the masterworks of Renaissance polyphony. I wrote a Crimson column toying with the notion of cultural continuity amid fast political change. I even stuck around my first two years to sing in the graduation choir (yes, I still love a good mawkish crimson Commencement).

That myth hinged in part on solid classroom instruction — anyone who hasn’t taken professor Gordon Teskey’s English 121CG: “Shakespeare after Hamlet” or professor John Stauffer’s English 90FD: “Rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass” is sorely missing out — but also on open minds and a willingness to see all aspects of a Harvard education charitably, even gratefully. In other words, not scoffing at the “section kid” with a genuinely heterodox reading of Shakespeare’s Caliban or a tear in his eye for the sorrowful state of Mariano José de Larra’s decadent Spain.

Some current undergraduates will no doubt be asking how they too can carve out that older vision of academic life, happily invested in a timeless intellectual inheritance.

First, don’t shy away from the greats. Study Shakespeare, Lincoln, the premier novelists, and so on, reading each author charitably to start.

Second, as the former Pusey Minister Jonathan Walton advised, be quick to compliment and slow to criticize. Do not refute ideas you could not reconstruct if needed.

Finally, think about permanence. What from your experience will survive, and what will not? (I doubt, for instance, there will ever be a Christmas in the Yard without the University Choir’s brilliant service, which I encourage all to witness at least once.)

Of course, these are only a small handful of ways to make meaning out of a Harvard degree. For those who disagree with my premise entirely — that college is for cultural transmission and not just acquiring skills or gorging on Harvard University Dining Services “red spiced” chicken — perhaps these tactics will seem less appealing.

Still, I urge my readers to give them a whirl. You may feel at first that you’ve put your faith in a myth (I did anyway). But that feeling will fade. And then you’ll find yourself a recent graduate, head still halfway full of Shakespeare or Marx or Joseph Conrad, wondering whether it’s worth venturing your partial answer to the eternal question – “Why Harvard?” — for whichever undergraduates might happen to lend an ear.

Henry N. Brooks, a former Crimson Opinion columnist, graduated from the College in 2019.