Harvard Can Handle the Attention

Whenever I phone home, everyone seems to know just as much about Harvard as I do. They’re not entirely to blame, though: Harvard is ubiquitous in the media.

The incessant coverage can be frustrating for us students, with overblown news stories constantly in circulation. But while condemning journalists might be tempting, we must resist that urge. After all, even frustrating, ostensibly “bad” publicity has merit.

For one, Harvard deserves it. Our University has earned not misleading or incomplete stories, but criticism and exposition — more so than other schools. Among other things, Harvard is the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning, and has the largest endowment of any university in the world. That is, it has had the most time and possesses the most resources to “get it right.” Our recurrence in the media is merely a reflection of those facts, and the inclination that there ought to be less outside coverage and less criticism, insofar as that criticism is fairly lobbed, is a denial of Harvard’s privileged position.

Yes, our visibility is exasperating for a variety of reasons. Most problematically, many narratives don’t capture the full picture. The Crimson’s Editorial Board and fellow editorial editors have argued that news stories about Harvard — especially those concerning grade inflation and the academic environment — can be “inflammatory” and without nuance. This causes wide-reaching misconceptions that students are frequently made to account for. My first break back home, the question on everyone’s minds was: Do Harvard students really get free A’s?

Beyond misrepresentation of issues, there is also a tunnel vision effect in the media, wherein Harvard and its students become the repository for broader ills of the academy. Questions of rigor and campus free speech aren’t specific to Harvard. But you would be forgiven for thinking so when The New York Times publishes a piece titled “Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say.”

Yet the constant attention provides an opportunity to remind the public of the value that our institution regularly creates. As another editorial editor argued, the University should embrace the opportunity to win back trust with the American populace at a time when our school has been widely vilified.

This contention holds beyond the current moment, too. Harvard produces, and has historically produced, exceptional work. It is the top-ranked university in the country for scientific research output, and it ranks first in the world in volume of highly-cited scientific publications. The school’s publicity is a critical opportunity to demonstrate that excellence to the rest of the country and the world — to win back public confidence in our University, yes, but more importantly, to keep it.

Still, it’s not the good publicity — that of scientific breakthroughs or revolutionary humanities research — which often plagues students. Few will nag you to know if your professor really wrote some paper; many more are interested in whether they vacationed on a certain private island. In some ways, this uglier side to Harvard’s public image is inevitable — it’s hard to have the good without the bad, especially when news audiences are far more compelled by the latter.

But even in instances of unfair coverage, there are often partial truths. The media’s coverage of former University President Claudine Gay, for instance, arguably played a crucial role in her resignation, prompting faculty outrage, comparisons to McCarthyism, and assertions that criticisms were sensationalized in a calculated political attack. That may all be true. Yet even so, the saga also yielded good in the form of the extant institutional neutrality policy. Widespread scrutiny, even if unjustly formulated, can incidentally strike at the truth in ways that empower Harvard to improve.

Either way you cut it — good publicity or bad — Harvard stands to benefit, whether in the promotion of the value it creates, or in the self-reckoning engendered by criticism of an institution best-equipped to act on it.

So next time you see the big H in the paper, or get a concerned voicemail from a grandparent who’s heard something on TV, don’t roll your eyes — the media swarm around Harvard is a good thing. If nothing else, it keeps members of The Crimson’s Editorial Board like this writer in business.

Jackson H. Barr ’29, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Canaday Hall.