The question is familiar, inevitable, and universal. It arises from your uncles at Thanksgiving, from your high school classmates that you run into when you are back home buying dental floss, and from every member of the opposite sex that you meet in a bar once they figure out what “a school in Boston” means:

“So, what is Harvard like?”

Most of us who face this question have developed a pre-packaged answer. For a while mine was, “Well, we don’t have intro accounting yet, and I imagine it’ll be years before we finally get an Ag department.” And more recently I’ve commented, “It’s like a pyramid scheme. They say it’s a good investment, but first you have to give them a lot of money and make sure other people also sign up after you leave.” Yet, despite how cute and creative the responses are, they only serve as a red herring to divert attention from the name and idea of Harvard.

Harvard as Harvard, of course, is an impolite topic of conversation, much like asking about a parent’s salary or someone’s racial composition. While the topic may drift up in the first few weeks of freshman year, it is quickly squashed by the monotony of concentration, secondary, citation, and Core credits and the erratic drive to build the old resume. Yet, periodically, the idea resurfaces. Most of the time, it’s in the form of a complaint as in, “Why the hell are they cutting hot breakfast? This is Harvard,” or “Why haven’t they fired the Dean of the College who sends asinine emails about the nuances of shuttle committee proceedings but doesn’t care to notify us about the drug-related dormitory murders occurring while she is sending out her asinine emails?”

Although the complaints are useful in shaming University Hall out of its more draconian antics, there are more important times when the idea of Harvard as Harvard surfaces in the mind. It’s during solitary moments when, despite the desire for humility and the claims of disillusionment, the mythology of this place overtakes one. For me, it happened one day when I was walking through the snow-covered yard and I realized that, sometime in the past three hundred years, someone whose name I learned in elementary school probably walked roughly the same path—and probably was also late.

At those moments, this place becomes more than bricks and coursepacks but rather something that is only tangible in the shared experiences. The Asian tourists posing for pictures in front of your entryway door or snapping pictures of your flabby pale self running Primal Scream, the professor who is interviewed on TV as an expert although you fell asleep in half his lectures, or the President of Mongolia’s security detail pushes you aside in the yard so the President’s unwashed hand can touch John’s unwashed bronze shoe. From the shared experiences like these, we have the moments when we recognize that our college is slightly unique from others.

I am convinced it is those moments that cause me and most of my fellow classmates to avoid the “What is Harvard like?” question, because the moments are both indescribable and unnerving. Last night, while I was emptying from my bookshelf all the unfinished readings I still had from my freshman seminar, I experienced the feeling again when I realized that my bookshelf will hold the unfinished coursework of many more students.

The crux is that Harvard was here before all of us and is likely to remain, when all that is remembered of any of us is the footnote written by a history concentrator who is trying to win a Hoopes Prize by digging up obscure minutiae. While we pass through and change, the college does not. The dorms will be filled with other students having their own love triangles. The UC will continue to amend its constitution. The faculty will reach a new revolutionary way to teach general education that looks like all the past programs. The senior thesis writers will escape to the same bars for the same drinks. And the Lowell House bells, though new, will continue to wake up anyone who has slept in past one.

The realization that we are not the culmination of history but rather a midpoint in the institution’s grand goal of apparently purchasing all the land in Massachusetts is what makes the idea of Harvard as Harvard unsettling. It begs us to question what our use or purpose is because, in the face of 5,000 years, earning power or money here and now seems rather pointless.

And while Harvard is an institution that wheels and deals in money and power, it is still in its heart an institution of knowledge. Knowledge that passed in whispers and parchment from generation to generation—incomplete only where it was neglected long enough for everyone who knew it to die off. The goal of a liberal arts education isn’t to get a sweet job from e-recruiting, but rather to teach each generation to be a bridge that passes the insights of humanity onto the next.

“So, what is Harvard like?”

To me, Harvard is like four years that will require the rest of my life to make sense of. It is the people and the stories, as well as the myth and the name. It is the realization that, just like Harvard is more than the sum of her students, what defines each of us is not just our individual selves, but also how we connect to the past and pass the better parts onto the future.


Steven T. Cupps ’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is a human evolutionary biology concentrator in Lowell House.