Putting a Human Face on Harvard

Before I arrived in Cambridge, I always thought Harvard had motored to its present grandness with the precision and cold mechanism of a machine: Each expertly-chosen part was ordered to perform its task with efficiency and independence.

The admissions office makes it very clear that this is a place full of diversity and excellence and a place to be exposed to remarkable people--but it also made clear to me that this was not a place for weaklings. I remember getting that message very strongly in "Some Notes for Freshmen," which in my year stated, "Harvard is sprawling...and sometimes frightening.... Harvard operates primarily in response to student initiative. In general, you will be left alone to your studies. This does not mean that you will be ignored but rather that you will be treated as a responsible person."

The Harvard vision of success seemed to be a combination of raw talent and a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where competition and natural selection would weed out the weak and where the strong would rise to the top--the products of a rigorous distillation of ability into a narrowly-defined conception of achievement. Harvard was great because of its Nobel laureates and its alumni heads of state, because it filled corporate boardrooms and seats in Congress. Its dominance of this type of accomplishment seemed enchanted. Good people came to Harvard to be challenged and proven against the mettle of the very best and to ride away into the world redeemed and self-satisfied by the experience. Their achievement was measured in wealth and prestige, in artistic and academic fame and in the myriad fields in which humans could excel.

This is one version of the Harvard myth, and one that is not uncommon for a member of an entering class to have. Harvard seems to make good on a large part of this myth and rewards achievement for its fulfillment.

But there is another vision of success that Harvard nurtures, one that I have always felt was done on a quieter level but which is more important. It is achievement in a world of human interaction, on an intimately personal level. It is self-development, the building of a sense of community and helping those outside our community. It is the instillation of a way of relating to others that is not complacent, that is sensitive to difference, that is probing.

Creating an environment where this type of achievement can thrive is not the work of giant funding projects or cutthroat competition; it is the doing of remarkable individuals in small gestures. Harvard College is full of some of the most successful people in this regard. They are role models for the type of person I would like to be: someone whom others respect and admire, not for anything extrinsic, but for the quality of his work and his compassion and kindness to others. Someone who is firm in his beliefs and values and who conveys them not by preaching, but by setting an example that others want to follow. Someone who operates in a world of demanding professionalism but who relates to others in a world of human feeling. Someone who inspires loyalty and fondness by being a strong friend.

These people come from all parts of our community: students, administrators, professors and staff. They take an intimidatingly large and divergent group of people and they imbue it with a human scale that draws common links. For me, they are the people who are Harvard.

In my first year at Harvard, I took at a job at the College Dean's Office that I have kept for the past four years. There, I was very lucky to get to know well Tom Dingman, the dean for the house system and for human resources, and senior tutor of Dudley House. He has not ever taught me in a class, but he has been one of my greatest teachers here. Tom has spent almost 30 years working in and out of Harvard, since graduating from the College in 1967 and the Graduate School of Education in 1973. I see him as a senior administrator who dashes in and out of his office to Administrative Board meetings in a flash of rep tie and blazer, but also as having a youth and restlessness to help that is absolutely contagious.

He is the kind of person who has stayed out until 3 a.m. searching for a boy who had run away from home in his neighborhood; the kind of person who once gave a cat to his secretary as a gift, honestly believing she would love it--and then taking it back home with him when she didn't. He is the kind of person who organized, with the rest of the office, to have a care package sent to my dorm room while I stayed up all night to write my thesis. He is one of the kindest people I have ever met, and I'm glad it is people like him who make decisions about how the College operates. His motivation for working here seems so right: When he was senior tutor of Leverett House, he wrote in one of his class reports that "I maintain my humility by remembering that I cannot remember who my own senior tutor was" -- betraying an adamance not to let others write the same thing about him. That sentiment comes from a reverence for an ideal of what this place should be and an inspired personal challenge to achieve it.

When my thesis adviser came to a Cabot House faculty dinner with me, I caught another glimpse of Harvard's human dimension. I had known Professor Ted Parson of the Kennedy School of Government as a blindingly intelligent public policy scholar with an interest in ozone negotiations, but at dinner--when we sat with two of my blockmates and their professors--he mesmerized the table with discussion about everything from game theory to Austrian royalty to Richard Rhodes' latest book.

Then he told me--almost as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do--that he had begun to look through his old college algebra textbooks and had started doing problems in them to relearn what he thought he had lost. A few days later, I saw a poster advertising a chamber music concert, with his name as the cellist; he told me afterward that he had once been a professional musician.

With an enthusiastic light in his eye and an omnivorous appetite for knowledge, Ted has shown me what it is to be truly educated: to have a concern with self-growth and to have pursued one's interests fully, to relate to others on a genuinely engaging level and to inspire others by the example he sets.

In so many small interactions all over the University across four years, I have come to understand what, at least for me, is responsible for Harvard's great success in the world. It is the priority we are taught to place on good human relationships and the way we are taught to cultivate them. Harvard attracts some of the very finest administrators and faculty to set examples for some of the most promising students. One of the most rewarding things about having spent time here is discovering that this is so, that the most successful people are those who have proven themselves in tangible fields, but who more importantly have concerned themselves with more intangible human qualities. These people seek self-development for its own sake, show a concern for the community around them and relate to others in a way that is abidingly compassionate, never complacent and always curious.

On my first bewildered days here, my senior adviser would greet me by name in the Yard and ask how I was doing. Talking to him, I always got the sense that he understood me exactly the way I wanted to be understood; he is one of the easiest people to talk to. On the day the housing officer I worked for in University Hall left to go back to graduate school, I saw her cry as she gave me a goodbye hug and pushed a gift into my hand. Just a few weeks ago, former dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 and I sat on a shuttle bus together. I didn't ever think he would remember my name, but in our conversation he knew everything, even which high school I had gone to and what my plans were for next year.

Everyone who leaves this College takes away stories about people who have inspired them by example. These people are the reason so many of us feel gratitude and fondness toward this place. They are the people who personalize, give life to and define an institution like ours.

Patrick S. Chung '96 was associate editorial chair of The Crimson in 1995.

One version of the Harvard myth lies in its Nobel Laureates. The other, in its people.