Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/04/29/narcissists_careerists_and_scholars.php
Wednesday, April 29, 1998
My grandfather, Richard Claypoole Wells '33, arrived at a Harvard built for men like him. He traveled in those elements universal at the school from the time of his father's generation. Richard's Harvard was a social club for jockish Easterners, a clannish and cheery aristocracy.
His consequent brand of alumnal reverence drew equally on two passions: a dogged devotion to Crimson football and a worried sense that his son (my father) wouldn't make the cut for Harvard admission.
Henry Wells, my father, took to heart his own father's concerns. Early in his senior year at Exeter, he headed down to the College counseler's office to ask if he shouldn't consider other Colleges beside Harvard.
The college advisor, a tall man bent with age and the weight of a ever-full belly, considered his file.
'Other colleges, Wells?'
'Yes sir. I was wondering whether I shouldn't apply to any other colleges.'
'Do you want to go to other colleges, Wells?'
'No, sir.'
'Well then, Wells, it would seem a bit foolish to apply.'
'Yes, sir.'
Less than a year later, my father drifted into Harvard's Class of 1959. The template of my grandfather's biography repeats itself.
My father joined a finals club and involved himself in the associated life of Cambridge, academic and social. By his generation, however, the guiding climate of Cambridge had changed.
My father had Henry Kissinger as a professor of International Relations his sophomore year. Kissinger would arrive in the lecture hall, devote 45 minutes to a series of personal anecdotes, beam a smile at the assembled crowd, and goose-step out of the room prepared for rapid transport to Washington. International Relations were left to the Teaching Assistants.
My father's career and consequent memories of Harvard have less to do with the fellowship and clubby cheer of my grandfather's age, and more to do with a certain celebrity self-awe, the present and future Great Names of the great American scene slumming together through the cheeseburgers and beertaps of bluecollar Boston.
The present Harvard, it seems to me, exists not so much to generate memories as to provide the framework for fabricated ones. Harvard and surrounding Cambridge stand as a grand conglomeration of fossilized institutions and institutionalized fossils.
The Crimson Sports Grille (see page 10) is The Harvard Bar, and undergrads trek there en masse to produce memories, but everyone looks a little unhappy.
Everybody talks about who had lunch with Alan Dershowitz, but nobody ever sees him in class; the research university's celebrity professor, in prototype. John Harvard's Brewhouse, the Co-op, the Lampoon, all of these are Harvard landmarks which have outlived their function but are retained for historical reference. They are famous for being famous.
So the self-referential beat of the Harvard generations goes on. The clubbiness is gone. The emphasis on teaching and learning are gone. What is left behind, in this prototypical research university and the beady narcissism that the academic celebrity culture revels in.
Not only are these kids internally pressured to lead and change the world, but their views of personal adequacy entail having detailed plans for the rest of their life by their 22nd birthday.
The Dartmouth Review's trip to Harvard was prompted by the thought that if Jim Wright really were going to change Dartmouth into a research university, we should take a thorough look at the research university's modern prototype, to remove the debate from the limiting abstract.
I invite the reader to consider, on pages 6-10, the evidence gathered, and to consider it within the context of the research university, and as a study in one variation of the new elite.
I did not find the Harvard students to be dorks. I did not find them condescending, or narrowly ideological, or uninteresting.
I did however find the culture of Harvard stifling, intellectually and creatively. Eighteen- and nineteen- year olds are forced (or perhaps force themselves; it makes no difference, it is inherent Harvard's culture of superiority) to define themselves ideologically and professionally.
Everyone I met at Harvard was explicitly occupied with the rest of their lives — the worried youthful elite narrowly bent on their own preordained success.
Beady narcissism grounded in panicky careerism does not strike me as the ideology America's best and brightest should be spending their formative years projecting.