The other night, while making my way back home past the chain-store charm of the Square, I stopped to have a conversation with a crippled man on the corner of JFK Street.

A veteran of the Marines, and not much older than I, this man had returned from Iraq with a hatred of battle, a love of the bottle, a prosthetic half-of-a-leg, and a mouthful of questions. After asking me this and that about student life, he imparted his own advice: “It comes down to three questions you have to ask yourselves: Who are you? Why are you here? And what’s all this really about?” (gesturing at me, then at the ground, then at the gates of Harvard).

It may have simply been one man’s existential crisis, but I knew at the time that there was much more to it than that. His questions felt like a challenge to all of us, a bold dare to once again ask some critical questions of ourselves and our university.

Over the past four years, I have seen this campus stirred and occasionally shaken by students, faculty, and workers who have dared to do so. Often pitting themselves against powerful institutions, they brought to light all manner of issues confronting the University: diversity and discrimination, wealth and poverty, civil liberty and authority, action or inaction in the face of atrocity.

At times, these efforts erupted into raging debates over the values and the character of the Harvard community. Yet as we prepare to leave this community at last, questions of who we are—and why we are here in the first place—remain very much open, fraught with contradiction, continually calling out for answers.

No doubt, this campus pulses with undercurrents of independent thought, creative energy, and imagined possibilities. Many students, however, find themselves falling in line behind the orthodoxy and authority of those highest in Harvard’s hierarchy of knowledge and power. Some soon follow the ladder even higher to place themselves directly at the service of corporate or state interests.

These hierarchies are entrenched even in our four years here, dividing the community by race, class, and gender. Despite the promising emergence of the most diverse student body in Harvard history, the forces of exclusion and elitism hold the present hostage to the ways of the past. Black students find their identity as Harvard students questioned by everyone from police to fellow students. Low-income students find themselves shut out and priced out of student life. Women find their social lives dictated on men’s terms, in boys’ clubs.

What will come next? This may become a tale of two Harvards. One seeks to reproduce the status quo and preserve the old pecking order, while the other intends to overturn it, step by step, and replace it with something fairer.

At the same time, Harvard at large finds itself in a kind of identity crisis, torn between contrasting visions of what kind of university it will be in this new century. As the returning veteran put it, pointing at the gates, “What is all this really about?” Is it about higher education and its accompanying values, or is it about education for money, power, and prestige?

On the one hand, we have Harvard, Inc.—Harvard as global brand, Harvard as multi-billion dollar investor, Harvard as a king of real estate on both sides of the Charles River. Over the last decade, the Corporation and its managers, equating financial growth with Harvard’s “educational mission,” have managed to transform whole portions of the University into the spitting image of a for-profit big business.

On the other hand, we have a Harvard community. But the corporate mentality has taken over much of this, too, yielding a consumer model of education (what will you shop for this semester?); and in the end, a whole generation of Harvard graduates enter the world as I-bankers and consultants, ready to go forth and give their all to make the rich richer.

Fortunately, there are many in the community who hold that the mission of higher education requires values other than money—the not-so-corporate vow of “Veritas,” for example, or principles of justice, accountability, sustainability, peace, and freedom. Ours is the generation of 9/11, Iraq, Katrina. Wherever we stand, we have learned that nothing, not even the Harvard bubble, can insulate us from the world—nor should it.

With that realization, more and more students are moving from apathy to action, or from confusion to conscience. As such, the community and the Corporation now find themselves locked in a fight for the future, a showdown over what kind of university Harvard is to be. Students have already made it clear that some of the ways of corporate America—whether it be paying poverty wages at home or investing in genocide around the world—will not fly here.

It is at once a battle of ideas and a struggle for power. For now, the Harvard community may be winning both. During the nine-day hunger strike that swept Harvard last month, hundreds of students encircled Mass. Hall, chanting, “We are unstoppable: Another Harvard is possible!” If this past spring was any indication of what is to come, “another Harvard” may already be on its way.

The next time I see my new friend on the street, I will tell him about this other Harvard in the making. I will tell him that this is who I was here, and this may have been what it was all really about. In the end, I couldn’t have asked for a higher education.

Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, a Crimson editorial editor and former editorial columnist, is a government concentrator in Kirkland House.