Sam Smith - It took less than 24 hours for the suspicion to arise that Harvard and I might not be well matched. Returning from my first Social Science 2 lecture, telling myself that I would understand it if I thought long enough, I sat down to read Max Weber. I was no further than seven pages along when I broke out into a cold sweat; I hadn't understood a word. Worse, in the days to come, I would find classmates discussing Weber as though they were critiquing the latest issue of Time. Some could even compare Weber with Marx, despite the fact that Marx was not even scheduled to be read for another two months. These students were prototypical proto-Harvardmen, already on their way towards what songwriter Allen Jay Lerner called Harvard's "indubitable, irrefutable, inimitable, indomitable, incalculable superiority."
Suddenly my cum laude from Philadelphia's Germantown Friends School seemed not much after all. I passed Soc Sci 2 with the help of cram sessions sponsored by indulgent brighter colleagues but my satisfaction in doing so was diminished by recognizing the gap between us. I didn't think like them; I didn't talk like them and, worse, I didn't want all that much to be like them. Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. To those immersed in this game, the imaginary assumed a substance of its own; as classics professor John Finley is said to have remarked, "Sometimes, I fear my son thinks that life is real."
I had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see, feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over, examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others what I had found. If you were brazen enough to think inductively, that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant, or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient categories.
In such a cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort of thing. From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the political apex of Washington, education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if, like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be. It seemed more like conversations with upper class Philadelphians to whom anecdotes were valued not for themselves but for their references to familiar persons or places. A bad story about a Biddle or Northeast Harbor was preferable to a good one about some person or place they did not know. At Harvard, of course, it wasn't Biddles and Northeast Harbor, but rather Hume and the Hegelian dialectic.
The dean of freshman, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr, once said to me, "You people from Germantown Friends look so good on paper. Why do you do so badly here?" It was a fair question; a number of GFS graduates were on probation and one had dropped out. I couldn't answer the question, but I quickly contributed to his stereotype. I drifted into a schedule that kept me up drinking - once a whole fifth of bourbon before bed - and talking much of the night while sleeping through classes. By the middle of freshman year I received a postcard from my English instructor: "Mr. Coles requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." I was quickly becoming, without malice aforethought, a Harvard dissident.
Although Harvard men don't like to talk about it, the Harvard dissident - with a few exceptions such as the Unabomber - belongs to a long and tolerably distinguished tradition. It includes Henry Thoreau, who had little truck with the place after he was through, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips who left Harvard a list of social causes to which it had contributed nothing and Ralph Emerson who complained that graduates come out "with a bag of wind, a memory of words -- and do not know a thing." Ogden Nash and Pete Seeger dropped out as did Bill Gates and Matt Damon, who left to pursue acting. William Randolph Hearst was asked to leave because, as a member of Hasty Pudding, he was pursuing acting too much.
There were other varieties of dissidents. Like the student of my era who departed this vale by backing himself into a rotating airplane propeller. Or my classmate who robbed a statue from the Fogg Museum, jumped off a trans-Atlantic steamer as a poetic gesture, was later spotted driving a motorcycle down a San Francisco street clad only in a crash helmet, and who subsequently wrote incomprehensible poems from his asylum. Or those who simply left the place, some of them still doing quite well even without the blessing of Harvard. Or the sixty odd members of my class whom the class secretary couldn't find by the 20th reunion, including two of my freshmen roommates. Or the women who were in every one of my classes but who are still non-persons of the Class of '59 because they were students of Radcliffe rather than of Harvard College
Thirty years after she graduated in 1962, New York politician Elizabeth Holtzman would say, "Nobody protested. We didn't know yet what was unfair. I felt privileged to be getting a Harvard education." A New York Times article the year of her graduation said that "Radcliffe girls," like those from other women's colleges, "don't do much of anything beyond marrying and raising children." The article was written by a Harvard man.
On the other hand, many of the Cliffies held their own. One of the stories told was of the professor chiding a woman student for knitting in class. "Knitting," he said, "is a repressed form of masturbation." Replied the student, "When I knit, I knit. When I masturbate, I masturbate."
There were other deviations from the stereotype: a sample of the 20th anniversary report of my class, presumably near the peak of its career, found almost half the members of the class didn't bother or didn't want to tell their Harvard brothers what they were up to. Among those who did there was one chief of a UN peacekeeping mission, one financial associate of John Hay Whitney, one teacher of transcendental meditation, one car dealer, one travel agent, one founder of a human potential school, one airline pilot, one owner-laborer-deliveryman of a firm making indoor potting soil, one funeral director, and one janitor who was a homosexual and proud of it. Among those who did not report, I know some who did interesting and useful things, some who went crazy, and some who had a struggle that, instructive as it might be to others, was hard to put in print.
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