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Let’s get one thing straight. The most unsafe I have ever felt as a student at Harvard University was on my second day of orientation, when I was chased screaming across the Yard by an angry wild turkey.

That said, my comparable enjoyment of the years that followed might come as a surprise to The New York Times, which appears to be seconds from sending a flak jacket-wearing war correspondent to cover Harvard’s 374th annual spring Commencement — to say nothing of governmental institutions that have targeted the University on the grounds of an alleged hostile atmosphere in idyllic Cambridge.

The events of the past four years, from Covid-19 lockdowns to presidential resignations, are hardly unique to Harvard. Yet our University has long cultivated a massive, generally unearned amount of space in the national popular imagination — an outsized attention that makes caricatures of students’ happy lives.

I’m here to tell you: the kids are alright.

The Crimson has never lacked for headlines, to be sure. As freshmen, we arrived to an empty campus regulated by strict Covid-cautious rules, and one newly promising to excavate Harvard’s legacies of anti-Black racism and slavery. No sooner had we learned to navigate course registration on my.harvard and the shuttle schedule than our collective campus life was jolted once more by the outbreak of protests against Israel’s wartime conduct in the Gaza Strip and by allegations of (and investigations into) antisemitism and Islamophobia, followed by high-profile leadership shakeups. As of late, campus stability is further threatened by the loss of federal research funding. A busy few years, huh?

This timeline, Passio GO! grievances excepting, could reasonably describe the undergraduate experience at any four-year accredited college in the country — yet Harvard persists in the headlines.

At time of writing, the New York Times has published over two dozen news articles, guest essays, and letters to the editor about Harvard in the last two weeks, an editorial prolificacy matched in its coverage of no other institution of higher education. A student encounters the power of her alma mater in her day-to-day life, in everything from the cultural saturation of “Legally Blonde” and “The Social Network,” to its use as a shorthand for intelligence. It is not only the substantial alumni network or institutional resources which open doors for a graduate, but the simple power of the name alone.

Harvard’s prominence is not accidental. Historically, Harvard leadership has embraced the University’s status as a representative for, and representation of, higher education. In 1958, as part of the postwar $100 million Program for Harvard College fundraising campaign, former University President Nathan M. Pusey, Class of 1928, wrangled a free hour-long radio broadcast from NBC to fundraise under the thin guise of promoting national postsecondary education. “Not just the quality of American education but the strength of the American people is going to be second-rate,” warned fundraising chairman Alexander M. White, Class of 1925 — unless the listener donated directly to the Program for Harvard College.

Well, an unbroken eight decades’ worth of Harvard leadership gleefully cultivating the University’s international prominence has come to collect.

Not only do students now bear the small, awkward inconvenience of a gynecological nurse asking for college-admissions advice for her son (true story; use your imagination). These days, an outsized media and national political fixation on Harvard has landed the school in the middle of countless lawsuits, congressional inquiries, revocations of government funding, and restrictions on the enrollment of international students.

We appear once more to be in crisis. There is A Situation On Campus.

I find all this catastrophizing both grating and untrue. For a graduating body of nearly 2,000 young people, Harvard is our beloved home. Here, its students binge-drink on Wednesday nights, enter into ill-advised situationships, and nap in hammocks on sunny afternoons. We are — wild poultry aside — safe and happy, content to enter into a sacred contract with our alma mater: to always coyly say that we went to school outside Boston, and if our VC startups make it off the ground, to toss the endowment a little walking-around money on reunion years.

It is the outsiders to the University, not its students, who bring to campus their leery and libidinous fixations on our ostensible well-being. Driven by the breathless excitement of news cycles, at varying points the world has heroicized us as prodigious leaders of the future, victimized us as innocent minds brainwashed by an agenda-pushing faculty (or even, as victims of our hateful peers), and villainized us as radicals.

None of these characterizations are true to life, and frankly, any one interpretation gives this population of moderately intelligent twenty-two-year-olds vastly too much credit.

Recognizing that it is a big ask, I will make the following request of you, reader who picked up a copy of the Commencement edition in a newsstand — believe me over your own lying eyes. Mute the Apple News push notifications and WhatsApp groups. We’re fine. Celebrate your Harvard graduate, wrangle the dolly cart on move-out day, and quit worrying about us.

Just be sure to stay away from the turkeys.

In addition to being scared of the Yard turkeys, Nina G. Howe-Goldstein ’25 is a History concentrator in Mather House and is the outgoing publisher of the independent campus commentary blog The Real Haters of Cambridge, Mass. She has loved her time at Harvard very much, though in all honesty, is ready to grab her magna degree and GTFO.