Beneath Badges of Recognition

Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 address to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society bears serious consideration by today's Harvard students. The address is an encomium to the title-less man and an attack on the institutional one. It is praise for those famous men who become famous of their own doing, who arrive at their own conclusions, who stand on feet unbuttressed by typical modes of external recognition.

At Harvard, we are surrounded with institutions and the temptations of the glorious public recognition they provide. While at the College, we are asked to comp the exclusive Lampoon and Advocate, we are punched for final clubs or the Signet Society, and we are considered for official, titled roles in student organizations. In senior year, we are sought after by firms with names like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, we are recruited by professional schools like Stanford Law and Harvard Medical, and we are nominated for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.

We are constantly asked to join, or to apply to join, one Club or another and thereby gain the automatic public notoriety associated with membership. Perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, Harvard students should remain wary of the apparently attractive benefits of "institutionalization".

Institutions somehow become much more desirable once they are pulled slightly out of reach. Harvard itself thrives on this principle. The University, no less than any other place with high walls and many guards, depends on its inaccessibility to attract candidates for membership. It entices students from all over the world to apply and, with a remarkably high degree of reliability, to get rejected. The University knows it wouldn't have quite so many applicants; the lower the chances of getting in, the more desirable the possibility.

Once we are accepted to the University, it appears, we are forever and anon Harvard/Radcliffe men and women. We are part of the vast and powerful team. So why complain? What's the cost of membership?

Emerson would say that institutional people run the risk of losing their originality. The purpose of the institution is to homogenize, and those who don't homogenize get marginalized. The cost of joining is submitting to other people's ideas, to conforming to a pattern of thought and behavior as predetermined as the one adopted by a cobbler's apprentice.

The biggest part of the problem is that our imitation receives public recognition through the institution's titles and awards. We imitate those who have come before us, then receive recognition for successful imitation, and finally get elevated to a position in which we can publicly recognize others for successful imitation. And because all of our ideas were imitative in the first place, mediocrity ends up begetting mediocrity. The mediocre get recognized, because they do not challenge the homogeneity of the institution, and they eventually accumulate enough awards and titles so that they are in positions from which they can legitimatize and celebrate other people's mediocrity.

As soon as we buy into some institution, Harvard or any other, we risk falling into the insidious trap of believing that titular or institutional recognition is an honest and perfect assessment of worth. We risk believing that the first place graduate of Yale Law School is the best young lawyer in the country, that the MVP is the best athlete in the league, or that the filmmaker with the Academy Award made the best movie of the year.

Sure, we all know we don't believe that, not for now anyway, but over time the truth behind the title disappears and all that remains is the title itself. In a few years we are left with nothing but the class ranking, the MVP award or the Oscar. The perhaps undeserving recipient of the honor is forever referred to casually as "So-and-so, yeah, he's a brilliant lawyer, he graduated first in his class at Yale, may make a fine Supreme Court Justice." And then the title forever carries a currency that it never should have carried in the first place. The institution's power grows, and the authority of truth diminishes.

Emerson would have us avoid this problem by rejecting the institution altogether. He would have us Harvard students reading and writing on our own, perhaps in the woods or on mountaintop. He would have us hatch theories of republican government and generate interpretations of literary works that are unfettered by the latest conventional wisdom or the newest periodization of artistic movements. He would have us think for ourselves, outside the institution.

Emerson's mountaintop is admittedly not very appealing. Nor is it practicable. Far better to stay here in Cambridge where the dorms are heated. But at the very least a colossal reevaluation of priorities is required. It is of immeasurable importance that we stop viewing titles and other forms of institutional recognitions as reliable signifiers of worth. Most titles are not altogether reliable (is everyone at Harvard as intelligent as you expected them to be?), and some are outright capricious (has every Oscar-winning director really made the best film of the year?).It is the responsibility of every Harvard student to remain most skeptical about the value of even the most "valuable" awards.

Michael B. Fertik '99 is a history and literature concentrator in Mather House.