At times during the past four years, I have had difficulty reconciling my comfortable presence at Harvard with the continuing sorrow elsewhere on our planet. I was conscious somewhat of my obligations to the rest of the world, yet I read books and wrote articles while some of our brothers and sisters screamed and died. I strained to keep up my connections with the world outside Harvard. I returned to my Chicago neighborhood to organize with the people I had left behind and to distill some common meaning from the diverging patterns of our lives. Yet still I could not shake the sense that some of the clearest memories I have of the past four years--being locked in a narrow jail cell with 50 other people after the anti-war demonstrations at the 1972 Republican Convention or walking down Brooklyn streets with a green-eyed woman--have nothing to do with Harvard.
...I have come around to a different view of Harvard, although my feelings regarding Kissinger can never change. There are men and women here, I realize, who have an alternative view of the purpose of a University. These people study American foreign policy or Vietnamese culture not because they wish to plan aggressive war or destroy Vietnam, but because they seek to push outward the frontiers of knowledge and enable people everywhere to grapple a bit better with the problems which confound us all.
The tyrants who rule the world and brutalize its people thrive on ignorance, doubt and supicion. Truth is radical; it works like water gently seeping, eating away at the structures of oppression. I no longer think of a university as necessarily a staging ground for the Kissingers; I think the Kissingers pervert the meaning of a university. My disgust for Harvard is no longer so general. It is directed at the Kissingers, the Bundys and the McNamaras and their apologists who murder and lie and then smugly smirk behind the liberal values they maintain.
Members of last year's class heard appeals from the Class Day speakers to turn "outward once again, turn outward to find again our place in the ongoing struggle of world rejuvenation." Sydney Freedberg, Radcliffe orator, told the Class Day crowds that the Class of 1976 had been shaped by its time, frightened by the United States' seemingly endless moral and economic depression. In response to this malaise, Freedberg asked her classmates to "turn to the future...Now that we have taken a long hard look at ourselves, it is time to act."
The need for action has not necessarily passed us by, but Ullman will attempt a lighter, comical approach:
Through the hallowed halls of Harvard, destiny now calls to us, the graduating Class of 1977. And if history serves as a knowing guide, our class will answer. Up from the Class of 1977 will come some 267 lawyers and 400 doctors earning an average salary of $80,000, 31 malcontents writing an average of 55 poems, 140 politicians and presidential advisors serving an average prison term of 18 months, and 1180 other respected and successful citizens. Morton Zyzford will not be one of these.
Morton Zyzford is the only members of our class to join no organizations, have no honors grades, receive no mail and no telephone calls, and establish no connections for later life. His sole distinction in our class is as last student listed alphabetically and even this has come to haunt him.
Humorous speeches often attract and move the largest numbers of people and by no means are to be frowned upon. Mark O'Donnell '76, who wrote numerous plays and lyrics during his four years at Harvard, received the loudest applause of the day for his Ivy oration last year. In his speech he defined the Harvard Experience with the help of a Webster Dictionary and a good deal of wit:
The Harvard Experience. (ahem) How does Webster's Dictionary define "Harvard?" A quick, haphazard glance provides this definition: "The gathering of crops...The season when ripened crops are gathered, a crop or yield of one growing season."
Well, this is clearly insufficient, if not outright misleading. How then, does Webster's define "experience"? Quite simply, it doesn't. It's a very bad dictionary. In fact, some editions of it have been known to bite small children.
All any of this proves is that the Harvard Experience is hard to recognize. I for one was a little leery, so I took my Harvard Experience downtown and had it appraised. It turns out I've been paying 6000 dollars a year for the Tufts Experience. I don't know if counterfeiting like this is rampant, but I guess the practice will continue as long as there are Ohioans.
He admits he wrote the oration for the sake of his "con-artist tendencies and a with to make people laugh."
On his return to Harvard from a six month stay in Ireland, O'Donnell is currently assisting in the production of a soon-to-be presented Harvard Premiere Society review. O'Donnell now claims to have never thought much about his Harvard Experience until he sat down to write a speech about it. "It's something you think about at the moment, not something you think about every day," O'Donnell says.
If the speech topics in 1977 are hard to come by, the Harvard Experience, whether presented in its barest forms or in the context of a larger world view has amused and sobered Class Day crowds for many Junes. Emil Guillermo, Ivy orator for 1977 has entitled his speech, "On Harvard where the B sucks and I got Cs." Guillermo says he feels changed by Harvard by having been "a Harvard Square pedestrian." He says in his speech: "To be totally dead is to be stripped of all your recommendations and test scores and have them attributed to someone else."
If it is the little experiences of everyday life at Harvard which the Class of 1977 will remember, at least the Class of 1977 speakers will be remembered for being the first in a long time to call for inward reflection. Speakers will be applauded for not asking their fellow classmates to act outwardly, but rather to consider their four years at Harvard with the quiet introspection that the seventies' students seem to demand.