Prefrosh at Heart

Harvard undergraduates and prefrosh have more in common than they should. This past Visitas weekend meant the arrival of 1000 excited prospective students and, for many current members of the College, memories of their own similar experience a year or years ago. To prefrosh, Harvard can seem like a confusing place, and not just because of difficulties in navigating the campus.

Then, once the previously-bewildered enroll, Harvard life gets simpler, the intuition runs. Foreign names like “Mather” eventually take on a determinate geographic location, class schedules are ironed out, and these once-unaware students figure out what it means to be at Harvard.

But the last part of this story, unfortunately, only sometimes holds true. When, for example, the Class of 2014 accepts their offers, they will join a community, but it’s not at all clear what identifies our community here at Harvard.

The easiest reply is that students join a community of learning. While the newest members of the undergraduate class are, according to Harvard’s admissions website, supposed to “pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation,” such lofty language appears markedly out of place given the rest of Harvard’s judgments.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Harvard hesitates to say explicitly that such a common bond unites us. Undergraduates’ latest institutionally-sanctioned educational philosophy comes from the Report of the Task Force on General Education. The task force’s framing of its new set of requirements fall well short of a claim to excellence. “The general education curriculum,” the authors admonish, “does not pretend to constitute a comprehensive guide to everything that an educated person should know. There is simply too much information to cover.”

Yet, the task force’s modesty concerning anything an educated person should know prevents it from establishing any sort of educational standard.  If you were to read through the rest of the Gen Ed report, you’d find that the task force never does get around to saying whether there is any specific content whatsoever that an educated person should know. Officially, Harvard will not even broach the topic of whether specific information is necessary for education, let alone declare in what way excellence comes from academic study. In general, the language of this report centers on a rhetoric of preparation, not a rhetoric of common pursuit with one’s fellow students.

Academics, then, probably isn’t the common thread. Maybe there’s another unifying element to the Harvard experience. Yet the other list of possible candidates—athletics, extracurricular activities, and community involvement—are subject to even more division and are less likely to focus students around a common goal.

This appraisal might seem correct, but some readers might not take issue at Harvard’s individualistic approach. After all, it seems that the idea of community at a university is not appropriate in today’s spirit of modern equality. Each student, free to make of his time here what he wishes, can, as the College’s admissions video reminds its viewers, make academics “whatever you choose it to be.” The same could be said, then, of every other component of student life as well.

Harvard’s official outlook, to be fair, does mention “late-night talks and dinner-table debates” as an important element of undergraduate life. Presumably, the collegiality present in these informal interactions could drive education at the College. However, to raise student collegiality to the level of the lecture hall would come precariously close to making academics not “whatever we choose it to be” and instead a matter of a common search for understanding—one that can’t be left at the exit of the classroom.  This collaboration might then serve as an unofficial limiting of each student’s self-direction of study, and counteract the administration’s insistence on autonomous determination of academics.

In this manner, collegiality and individuality exist in tension, for the truly sovereign student does not need the input of his fellow classmates.  Harvard, as a result, will tolerate but remain uncomfortable with an approach that emphasizes interdepenence, since collaborative efforts have as their logical prerequisite a common understanding or goal. Prefrosh and students are alike in this respect in that however long students remain on campus, a community of learning never coalesces around a shared pursuit.

Answering the question of “what makes a student educated?” without reference to specific content is a good way to ensure that academics do not serve as the basis of community. The modern university seems uncomfortable with the language of common pursuits. Instead, as the Gen Ed report will remind us, education is about my ability to respond to the changing world as I, not the community, sees fit.

The Harvard approach to student life is motivated by a strong individualism that enervates attempts to establish a community, since the idea of community requires that each of us not make college life “whatever you choose it to be” and instead identify a common end as worth pursuing, whether that’s in or outside of the classroom.  It’s for this reason that college undergraduates are no wiser than prefrosh—spending time here doesn’t really tell each individual what Harvard life is all about. Instead, Harvard purposefully structures its attitudes and educational rhetoric to comment only on each person’s life as it matters to the student, but certainly not to the wider community. A collection of nominally associated individuals can affect powerful change in the world at large, but not the shifts in attitude that would establish collective striving within.  Without this last change, community at Harvard will remain up to individuals’ efforts to forge it,  For prefrosh and undergraduates alike, membership in the wider Harvard community will remain a nebulous concept.

Gregory A. DiBella ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government & philosophy concentrator in Mather House.