Capital Punishment

"IF YOU DON'T TRY, you can't fail." So posits one of the venerable Salada tea bags that have guided many through this herky-jerky four-year escapade. I'd always laughed at its more-jaded-than-thou outlook. After my oral exams, Salad's wise man is the one doing the snickering.

Most students at one time or another will come up against something which makes them question whether what's going on at Harvard has anything to do with Education at all. Rigid deadlines and specifications, off-base paper assignments and readings, exams graded without any comments, all contributes to the suspicion that something less than the hallowed Pursuit of Knowledge is transpiring.

But of all these, none is more dreaded or reviled than the oral examination, the supposed summation of all that has gone before. Some students change entire plans of study just to avoid them. In the History and Literature department, an all-honors concentration, orals are required for high honors (magna or summa cum laude), no matter what one's academic standing.

I knew since going Hist and Lit at the end of freshman year that in risking orals I was flirting with hellfire. My memory is such that people I've grown up with often have to tell me stories about myself. I also have moral qualms about the concept of oral tests: they merely test your ability to bullshit while sipping sherry with other literati with the added incentive of a machine gun aimed between your eyes.

If put on the spot, few people will recall Henry VIII's wives' names, or the opening line of every novel Hemingway wrote. That's why people talk about the weather or the movies: they resort to something tangible in front of them that they can analyze and be witty about.

But oral exams expect something else. There are 6500 stories in this college, and this is one of them. I wasn't allowed to change the date of my test despite having a radio show until 8 a.m. that day, and having a 15-page paper due the next. I wasn't allowed to know who my examiners were until I arrived at the Hist and Lit office, hair still drying, coat slightly rumpled. Then it was confided to me in a stage whisper that I had drawn "The Inquisitor" (not his real name), one of the most well-read professors, and "The Executioner" (should be her real name), one of the most despised cold-fish history grad students. I had four minutes to compose myself. I considered swallowing a bottle of pills and then dying at their feet.

I WAS ALREADY prepped for improper judgements from what had happened to my thesis: my first reader begrudged me a cum plus, saying I didn't prove any of my points, I was a sexist, and had made too many typos. My second reader gave me a summa minus, saying that while there were flaws, chapters 2, 5 and 6 were terrific. So it was given to a third reader because of the discrepancy; she also awarded a summa minus, but said that by far the strongest chapters were numbers 3 and 4. With this foreknowledge of subjectivity and chance, I felt ready for anything. So I thought.

The Inquisitor walked me up to the stone wall. "I see your thesis is on popular literature. Have you studied popular literature of the 18th century?"

"What course teaches that?" your humble narrator asked.

Oh, I meant on your own, "the Inquisitor said, obviously disappointed that I hadn't spent all my spare nights paging through yellow pamphlets in Widener's dustiest recesses. Since he hadn't read my thesis, he turned to my bibliography page, and said, "There are a lot of names here I expect, and then, there are a lot of others missing." He began to tell me whom I should have used. I said that I felt my interpretations of the books and films were just as valid as the people he was naming, and that I couldn't read everything-especially if I hadn't known it existed.

The Executioner marched in with the firing squad. "Is there any particular era you want to concentrate on," she asked, in the same tone might offer me a last cigarette. "Well, I took a course on the 1930's-though I don't want to just talk about the thirties," I replied, hurriedly trying to recall what books I'd read for it.

"Okay, then," she said, looking down at a hidden piece of paper. "Let's talk about the origins of the American Revolution."

It's hard to remember specifics from a nightmare when you wake up, my answers are a blur, but I recall quite vividly each question she detonated in her allotted twenty minutes: What was the effect of the French Revolution on American politics-can you think of any specific policies it altered? What were the reforms of the early 1800's? Discuss the two "Great Awakenings" and how they differed in scope and audience. What was the Gilded age, and from where did it derive its name? Did World War I put an end to the Progressive Era?

Every question was double-barreled, aimed at my ever-shrinking cranium. If I got past any of the board land mines, I was forced into pinpointing my ignorance more sharply. Oral exams are verbal pole-vaults: keep making stabs till you fall on your face.

I do remember this classic exchange, which jackhammered rivets into coffin: after discussing the reforms of the 1800's, I mentioned that the women's and anti-slavery groups felt similar needs. The Executioner's eyes lit up like an electric chair "Can you think of a specific instance when the two were linked?" I shrugged helplessly. The Inquisitor interrupted, asking her, "Now, was the connection actually made at Seneca Falls?" She replied something like, "Well, not in the platform, but in the speeches made outside." She then turned to me an asked to name the women who had made this link. I shook my head. She told me it was the Frick sisters, or something like that. She went right into the Great Awakening question.

I stopped her. "Excuse me, but I'd just like to say that the only time I was taught the reforms of the 1800's here was in History 71 [the survey course], in which they take up two pages of a 600-page text, and those women are named once. For you to expect me to know their names is ridiculous."

THE FIRING SQUAD cocked their triggers. The Executioner never even got up to the thirties; I can't say she did this on purpose and it doesn't really matter since I would have gaffed just as badly. To the Inquisitor's credit, he helped me all the way through his queries with obvious hints, but by then I was reeling, feeling they had tied the blindfold and then asked me what color clothes they were wearing.

We got back to the subject of popular literature, and the Executioner asked, "Can you think of any examples of high literature which use the vernacular?" No. They suggested Twain. I hate Twain I said. "That depends on what you mean 'high' literature."

"Well, he got an honorary doctorate from Oxford," the Executioner said. "That confers at least some sort of 'high' status."

"I guess," I said. The bullets let fly and riddled my body. The blood and tears of generations flowed freely.

I learned later from an insider that I'd actually failed my orals, though I'm not supposed to know this. Children, for god's sake, don't doubt your elders. I may be the first Harvard student to get two summa readings and a prize for a separate essay and yet fail his orals. I'm still graduating honors, but not before being forced to realize what a flop I'll be at cocktail parties. As of now I'm unemployed, but I think I have a future writing Salada tea bags.