Learning to Think at Harvard

A garbage bag filled with rotten bananas came hurtling down the Weld hallway my freshman year in the grand finale to what I affectionately call “The Great Banana War.” I ducked, and thus ended the weeklong battle: from fresh bananas being hidden in the bed to a physical struggle for control of the banana bag, from the concealment of the bananas in a package as camouflage to a brief “water-being-poured-down-our-door” episode, and the much-maligned campaign, in which the rotten-banana-smeared cardboard left under my bed failed to produce the pungent smell required for the attack to be effective.

These fruitful forays, far more than the Core Curriculum, taught me how to think at Harvard.

I’m sure my parents are wondering why they didn’t just send me to a supermarket for four years if all I needed to stimulate by brain was some bizarre banana enterprise. But at Harvard, we don’t just play with our food. We do it critically, applying whatever excess brain power our tutorials leave us to determine the best way to smear rancid fruit onto a box.

The speeches we heard during prefrosh weekend, freshman week, and Junior Parents’ Weekend assured us that we were going to learn more at Harvard from the chats over coffee after class than from the lectures themselves. We might have laughed at first because, well, when was the last time anyone had an academic epiphany at Starbucks?

But it wasn’t the idea of constant learning that administrators got wrong—it was the time and manner in which this learning would occur. The real thinking takes place during the 4 a.m. debate about whether Kantian ethics can prove “Crash” really was an Oscar-worthy film, or the middle–of-the-afternoon discussion on how Foucault proves that “Pimp My Ride” can only be understood as a social phenomenon embedded in relationships of dominance and control.

This might sound like I’m accusing Harvard graduates of being anti-intellectual, rebelling against a strict academic environment by taking solace in something unimportant. But, in fact, I think that we are over-intellectual: we seek to find an underlying argument or an overlying strategy in every random encounter.

That we have questioned pretty much everything since birth is obvious—after all, you don’t get that good at arguing with everyone in section without practice. But Harvard has only further fueled this desire by placing us in a playpen with 1,600 other opinionated kids and then encouraging us to “play nice” by engaging each other in conversation, even if it’s just about the most efficient way to employ the toy dump truck in the sandbox.

And now, as we say goodbyes to professors and receive congratulations from relatives, we will get two types of advice. The first type insists that we must use our talents to change the world dramatically. The second maintains that it is more important to focus on the most immediate things, making a difference one person at a time. But how well we fare on either path will depend on how faithfully we retain the most important lesson Harvard has taught us: how to challenge, and be challenged by, other thinkers and ideas, regardless of their prominence or scope.

Harvard is conducive to these sorts of intellectual adventures, a place where we have the time to muse on the various philosophical approaches for eating in the dining hall, dissecting the perfect strategy to win Last Senior Standing, or bluffing our way through yet another hand of Texas hold ’em. But in the future, we’ll be pressured to channel our conceptual energies into specific and limited applications, compartmentalizing what and when we are allowed to learn. Even if we attain intellectually fulfilling careers, we will still have to contend with the unavoidable peril of adult life: that is, of thinking becoming a mere chore that we’ll want to avoid whenever we aren’t made to do it.

For anyone who has ever wished that “that guy” in class would shut up, or for anyone who has realized that she has turned into “that guy,” it might seem a good idea to stop issuing strong opinions. Perhaps our brain power could be put to better use if we focused it on the job at hand, rather than expending it while playing Halo. Yet this is not reason enough to conform to the nine-to-five theory of critical thinking

It is easy to turn into a “yes man” or, even worse, a “Yale man,” to get a promotion, and it is easier still to survive socially by not asking what Stewie represents in an existential framework the next time you watch “The Family Guy.” It is tempting to stop thinking, to stop approaching the world as though every idea can be contested even if the debates often seem to become silly. But even when we’re far removed from the gates of Harvard Yard, we must continue to challenge, to question, and to explore everything. After all, to critically consider even the trivial proves that we are fully engaged with the world.

When that bag of bananas just barely missed my head freshman year, I thought, “Why?” But then I immediately started to determine the most effective method of banana retrieval, repossession, and possible surrender. Because even when you’re being attacked by fruit, you cannot stop thinking.



Margaret M. Rossman ’06, who was a Crimson deputy editorial chair in 2005, is an English concentrator in Mather House.