Jim McMahon, the Chicago Bears’ wild quarterback of the mid-1980s and an unlikely graduate of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said that the best thing about Provo was “leaving it.”
As you seniors face a farewell to Cambridge—and you non-seniors know that it looms in the future—I doubt that you’ll share McMahon’s attitude toward college. Harvard may have many lamentable features, and lamenting them is in fact a favorite pastime. But in spite of its defects, by far the worst thing about Harvard is leaving it.
I know whereof I speak: Next fall I’ll be an assistant professor at Swarthmore, so this is my last Harvard spring as well. While I like to complain as much as anyone, learning and teaching at Harvard—as a graduate student and then a lecturer—have been the most rewarding engagements of my adult life, ranking just behind my adolescent summer job hawking peanuts at Wrigley Field (in part because the earlier position paid slightly better).
Sure, I’ve had my share of awkward academic encounters. I taught a Monday section that was almost entirely mute except for the occasional sound of my voice, the dull hum of an electric clock, the gentle heave of someone’s hungover breathing and the faint notes of Led Zeppelin emanating from one student’s set of badly hidden headphones.
I graded a paper in which a student cited none of the assigned readings, failed to address the topic question and then balked at his “C” grade because—and I quote—“my 12-year-old brother could understand my paper.” (I kept the student’s grade unchanged but gave his brother a “B.”)
I witnessed one enormous, surly student attempt the seemingly impossible and surely inadvisable “month of 1,000 beers”—the goal being exactly as it sounds—only to fall 10 drinks short because he undertook his feat in the month of February.
But stories like these are few and far between. Overall, I could not have asked for a more intelligent and inquisitive population of students, better facilities in which to teach them or better faculty advisers and colleagues. I was fortunate to have made brilliant and generous friends in just about every category of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual persuasion, as well as a few who have yet to be persuaded. I felt continually grateful to be at a supportive institution rather than the university at which one senior professor made his advisees tar his roof, or the one at which an underemployed faculty member had to moonlight as a janitor. The academic career path may be a labor of love, but as many of you are discovering in your romantic lives, there’s a fine line between love and utter humiliation.
Lest you misinterpret my words as undue skepticism, I truly esteem my profession. However, no one should enter an academic career without intensive inquiry and self-reflection. Before you serve 5 to 10 years in a minimum-security graduate school, decide whether you actually love reading exhaustively in one area and writing academic monographs for an audience of 27, or whether your real love is sharing your excitement about ideas, or whether you simply love the experience of being a student. If you’re in category two, consider the very worthy profession of high school teaching. If you’re in category three, just wait 50 or 60 years and you can return to classroom studies at your local community college, where retirees constitute some of the most dedicated learners (but where “senioritis” among the students means not “spring fever” but senility).
To be fair—and to leave you with one last piece of advice—I urge the same kind of reflection before you embark on any career path. Many people wander into life-long commitments without considering the likely effects on their happiness. If you enter a profession such as, say, corporate law simply because you’re good at reading, writing and arguing, and would like a big paycheck, and don’t know what else to do with yourself, don’t be surprised when the main accomplishment of your lawyerly efficiency is a mid-life crisis achieved 10 years ahead of schedule. The same can be said for other Harvard career favorites such as business and medicine.
But enough about career choices that might not affect you for several years. Here’s one thing you can do right now. Before you discover the worst thing about Harvard the hard way, by leaving it, try to figure out the best thing about Harvard—best for you, that is—and then experience it as often as possible. Hang out late with friends. Act in a play. Go to your professors’ office hours. Learn for learning’s sake. Have a blast this weekend.
Whatever you choose, do me just one favor: Come Monday morning section, shut off the damned headphones.
