This is the second article in a three part series.
Part 1: Learning To Live by Harvard's Rules
Part 3: Making It Big to Set Things Right

The call came sophomore year. Bryan C. Barnhill ’08 was writing a paper for Social Studies 10 when his mother told him the news: His uncle was heading back to jail.

Barnhill thought immediately of his uncle’s kids and the financial burden his parents would shoulder, as they had before.

He felt guilty for not being back home in Detroit, where family members struggled to pay the rent and—it seemed—someone was always out of a job.

Here at Harvard, where opportunities seemed endless, Barnhill felt helpless to change his uncle’s world.

He knew he had to return to his paper.

There are moments when he feels he is fully a part of Harvard: shooting pool at his final club, for instance, or giving advice to freshmen at the Black Men’s Forum.

Then there are moments like this one.

“No matter how seamless your being part of this environment appears,” he says, “you’re not, and perhaps you can never be.”

A BROTHERHOOD OF SUCCESS

For a growing number of students who come from outside of America’s established elite, the process of becoming part of Harvard is shadowed by reminders of what they have left behind.

Barnhill, in particular, has had to bridge an ever-widening gap. Friends from his block now have children; many didn’t even make it out of high school. Meanwhile, Barnhill got into Harvard, and then the Spee.

Final clubs—all-male bastions of old-school tradition—lie at the heart of Harvard privilege. They have been criticized for enshrining the worst of Harvard’s past: racism, sexism, social snobbery.

As a black student on financial aid from one of Detroit’s toughest neighborhoods, Barnhill does not fit the stereotypical image of the final club man.

But, Barnhill says, it was joining a club that made him finally feel as if he really belonged at Harvard.

According to the clubs’ etiquette of silence, Barnhill declines to name his club on the record. But it’s common knowledge in the Harvard social scene that he’s a member of the Spee, founded in 1852.

Sophomore year, Barnhill would call family and friends at home to tell them about the punch, the club’s selection process. He described the coat-and-tie mixers and luxurious outings. The experience only reinforced the Harvard mythos.

‘IN MY ENVIRONMENT’

Barnhill found himself at home in 76 Mt. Auburn, in rooms decorated with oil portraits and 16th-century tapestries. Up the stairs a series of Hogarth prints illustrates, with delicate irony, the dissipation of 18th-century England.

Back home in his Detroit neighborhood, music blared in the streets. Old folks chatted on their front steps, and men squatted on the curb to play dice.

But in the Spee, members play their games in the poker room or at the billiard table, near the French doors that open to the garden.

Barnhill says he cannot afford the club’s full dues. Nobody cares, he says. He tells the club secretary how much he can afford. Sometimes the club covers his dinners with members, but other times he just stays behind.

He’s no token, he says, just another one of the guys.

The year he got into the Spee, Barnhill’s parents, a truck driver and a trained nurse, came to visit.

Marcia L. Barnhill still remembers the members welcoming her: “Oh you’re home, make yourself at home.”

His father, Bryan C. Barnhill, was less impressed by the swank trappings than the Spee’s history. John F. Kennedy Jr. ’40 was once a member.

“I came away with the feeling that he was a member of organization of people who were successful and who could network with one another and help each other achieve their goals,” his father says.

That kind of networking was something Barnhill couldn’t have learned at home, his father said in a phone interview from Napoleon, Ohio, were he was picking up a delivery at a Campbell Soup plant.

“In my environment, the urban area, people don’t really network very much,” he says. “You have a select group of people that you know and trust and you know how to deal with and you’re kind of reluctant to trust strangers.”

After four years, it’s the social training, not the academic one, that Barnhill prizes.

“Those are really the only skills that Harvard will really provide,” Barnhill says. “I mean, the education is great, but it’s impractical.”

CALL ON ME

When he goes back to the streets of Detroit, Barnhill says, he can see the influence his success has had on his younger brother and his cousins.

“They’re becoming more active in their communities and schools and making the grades,” his mother says.

If Harvard is a possibility for him, they realize, it might be a possibility for them.

People in his neighborhood are eager to hear how he’s doing in Boston. Everyone knows him, Barnhill says, as “the Harvard guy.”

There is, he says, “sort of like this reverence that placed barriers on me being able to connect with them anymore,” he said.

Barnhill tries to maintain his closest relationships. But it’s not easy when his friends are struggling just to get by.

“Me trying to motivate them comes off as being really disingenuous,” he says. “I have no idea what they’re going through.”

In the neighborhood, his mother says, the kids he used to play with now have kids of their own. Some of them are selling drugs. None of them have anything close to his opportunities. But, she says, “They recognize that he continued and stayed the course, and they voice pride in him,” she says.

They’re not jealous, his mother says.

They just tell him, “Glad you made it out.”

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.