While I was reading Stephen Pinker’s thoughtful article about Harvard’s battle with the Trump administration in the New York Times, I had an insight that surprised me. Ever since the infamous Elise Stefanik-led congressional hearings which led to the demise of several prestigious college presidents, including Claudine Gay of Harvard, I have feared for the future of higher education in America. I couldn’t help thinking about Pol Pot’s campaign in Cambodia to kill off the country’s educated class, including everyone who wore eyeglasses, a sure sign of their position as “knowing” citizens who might be a source of opposition to the government’s self-genocidal policies.
None of what I just said so far contains the insight that bowled me over. The distress I’ve just described, impassioned though it may be, isn’t rooted in any emotional attachment to Harvard itself, which may surprise others who know my history as much as it surprises me.
Harvard was one of the four or five graduate schools that I applied to. I knew little about their clinical psychology program, but what did I need to know other than that it was Harvard? My immigrant parents were thrilled when the letter of acceptance arrived in the mail. Harvard was one of the few universities whose name they recognized, as I’m sure is the case with the families of many of the international students currently studying there whom Trump is now trying to displace as part of his effort to starve it to death through the loss of tuition and grants.
I am forever grateful for that open door but from the day I set foot in Cambridge as a graduate student, I felt like an outsider. So much of the mythology of Mighty Harvard was forged in its undergraduate houses where Harvard men (and later women) were being shaped. Graduate school was a much less cosmic experience, at least it was for me, less about great ideas than about a narrowing kind of professional preparation. I got a taste of the undergraduate world when I slipped away from the clutches of the clinical psychology program to audit courses in literature and history, offered in lecture halls where BIG ideas were being offered, the kind that would leave their imprint on evolving young minds.
There were occasional glimmers of that more intense experience in my own graduate program but several factors limited the way they were imprinted on me. First, for undergraduates, those academic experiences were embedded in a social milieu consisting of the houses and clubs that were absent from graduate school experience. I lived in a cinder block dormitory which was not fertile territory for building intense life-long social relationships. My social and intellectual world was largely contained within the small cohort of a dozen+ psychology students who entered the program with me. There was little in that brew that translated to a love of and attachment to the larger institution in which we were housed.
Second, acculturation is a slow, cumulative process. I was only in Cambridge for two years before I was off to San Francisco for a year-long internship in clinical psychology which was not illuminated by Harvard’s distant aura. It was a rough introduction to an adult professional world that probably left more of a stamp on me than the two years that preceded it. Besides, I had entered the world of Harvard from my own undergraduate training ground at City College. I was forever going to see myself and be seen by others as a CCNY kid, more than a Harvard man. In fact, I arrived determined not to allow that image of the first generation Jewish intellectual to be overwhelmed by Harvard’s elitist establishment brand.
It was a different time. I landed in Cambridge in 1960 when America was just awakening from a fairly quiescent decade. That was about to change dramatically but there was nothing that compares to the crosscurrents of ideological, political, racial and gender issues that have torn contemporary campuses apart. The one exception was the civil rights movement which was just emerging in the South and catching the attention of students, including me, and propelling us toward action. But even that issue was not divisive in the way, say, Israel/Palestine is. Students were either drawn to it or unmoved by it. When I became a teaching assistant in the college’s very popular Race Relations class taught by Dr. Tom Pettigrew, I was riding a tide that soon swept me away from Harvard into the world of Mississippi. It was the gift the school gave me that has shaped every subsequent move in my life.
For that I suppose I should owe a debt of gratitude to Harvard, but it evokes from me little loyalty or love. Like Dr. Pinker, I will defend and support Harvard in its current battle despite its shortcomings, but that is mainly because it stands against the gutting of the American university system and against the proliferation of low-information, low education voters who are the backbone of authoritarian regimes.
