What is that culture? It is a culture that breeds hypocrisy. It is a culture that reduces politics to squabbles between ethnic and gendered interests and forces an equation between true commitment and naivete. Is the feminist really at fault--as I have implied--for patronizing an organization that denies equal status to women? Should not political commitment involve sacrifice in one's daily life? But where is the appropriate sacrifice too large? Perhaps at Harvard, where I have already lamented there are few neutral public spaces where students can go? Our political life is defined by the comically inconsistent private behavior of so many "activists," and the increasingly sanctimonious and hysterical nature of public discourse.
What is that culture? It is a culture that fosters the worst sort of arrogant self-righteousness. I have often wondered what might be wrong with a person who, dissatisfied with their food, would actually yell at a waiter at a restaurant. Now I know--they probably went to Harvard. Too many people here have been told that the world is their oyster. And, they've been told far too many times. We all have an exceptional aptitude for academics, but we are not gods or royalty. The student in the crepe shop, like so many here, had clearly forgotten the distinction between a high SAT score and divine right. To be fair, Harvard has done nothing to remind him.
Amidst all the festivities surrounding Commencement, there is a distinct temptation to let bygones be bygones, to raise a glass with my peers, and to toast Fair Harvard. I will resist that temptation. I will not celebrate a place that not only disregards, but actively demolishes, the qualities of decency and humility in the people that it educates. I will raise a glass to my small group of friends, who far better than I, have managed to navigate these past four years with their sense of philanthropy and optimism intact. Whatever good, they, or I, accomplish in the world, will not be because of Harvard, but rather in spite of it.
Noah D. Oppenheim '00 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. This is his final column.