When I first heard, over a month ago, that a park I had never heard of in lower Manhattan had been ‘occupied’ by a group of activists protesting against the nation’s stampeding income inequality, I ought to have been excited. Instead, I was suspicious. It was a suspicion that ran through my time at Harvard—in particular, straight through the 2007 hunger strike, where my high-school-era appetite for protest politics, already getting skinny, was finally starved to death. Harvard culture, with its indulgence in a braying, me-first politics of conspicuous conscientiousness exhibited in the rapid rate at which good deeds converted into résumé raw material, had poisoned me against the words ‘service’ and ‘activism’. The term ‘limousine liberal’ became a favorite epithet, which I applied injudiciously to everything from the oh-so-genteel IOP technocracy to the fashionable martyrdom of Teach for America. I am still fond of the term. And so in Zuccotti Park I saw the specter of Harvard activism, and recoiled.
Slowly my opinion began to turn. A lot of this had to do with the fact that people who I genuinely respected—both personally and in the popular press—were lining up to support the Occupy movement. A clearer political program began to come into resolution from fellow-travelers, if not from the protestors themselves. And, most importantly, it started to work: even Republicans were forced to at least pay lip service to the monstrous failure of the American economy to distribute its winnings fairly. Finally I decided that a constructive optimism, rather than a venomous cynicism, was the right attitude to bring to bear on Occupy.
Just as I was forgetting my Harvard hangups and beginning take Occupy on its own terms, Occupy came to Harvard. Students were camped out in front of John Harvard, much as they had done in the hunger strike, and were squawking once again about workers’ rights without having any workers around. It would have been easy to fall back into curmudgeonly recidivism. But from a distance, the protest seemed less self-indulgent and more heroic than protests past had seemed from up close. Most of all, it made perfect sense that a revolt against the unchecked ascendance of the plutocracy had finally made its way to the school that helped it all to happen. As Dylan Matthews put it, “if any place deserves to be occupied, it’s Harvard.”
And yet many of my classmates have rallied to the old alma mater’s defense. Alexandra Petri’s defense of the school exploded onto Facebook. The comments pages on the Crimson filled up with righteous defenses of Harvard’s unimpeachable goodness. And the unseemly milking of football patriotism to fatten the Corporation’s coffers continued with nary a burp. Harvard students, having stirred their own identities at least partially together with the identity of their college, seem to take criticism of the institution as criticisms of themselves.
Does Harvard deserve the full force of occupation, or is it a misunderstood angel? While I do not want to slip into a kind of divide-by-two automatic centrism, I would suggest that the answer is somewhere in the middle. First, though: Harvard itself has no immanent value of its own. Its value consists of its constituent members: when we talk about Harvard, what we are talking about, really, is Harvard People. Some are vastly more influential than others, but insofar as we can ascribe ‘qualities’ to Harvard, we mean the qualities observable in its agents. John Harvard’s bronze visage makes its way into plenty of news stories, but he’s not doing very much deciding. This means that launching a critique of ‘Harvard’ is enormously difficult. It is full of bright students, humane thinkers, decent citizens, and so on—and it is also full of selfish brats, mawkish nostalgists, and plain evil narcissists. It is completely reasonable to attack and embrace Harvard with the same motion.
One argument that I would like to deflate, however, is the oft-parroted bit of nonsense that Harvard’s financial aid system renders it immune to any claims of élite insularity. People who believe this have, I am sorry to say, been successfully bribed by one of the most successful charades of pity-charity liberalism ever undertaken. Harvard’s financial aid scheme, while leavened by a genuine bit of true philanthropy, is first and foremost a massive exercise in public relations, designed in large part to preserve its privileged tax-free status. If Harvard’s true animating drive was public generosity, it would not protest so violently at the threat of taxation. If its true goal was broadening the franchise of higher education, it would dump its endowment into expansion projects and accept twice as many students and double its acceptance rates. And if it truly wanted to open its doors to low-income students, it would follow the successful model of the work colleges. But Harvard doesn’t want to do these things—it wants to continue educating a tiny fraction of America’s college students who are special primarily insofar as they make up such a tiny fraction. To do this while remaining lily-white in the eyes of the public, it has gone to great lengths to showcase a perception of equal opportunity. As evidenced in the reaction to the Occupy protests, this campaign has been wildly successful.
What is to be done as a Harvard alumni who neither wants to defend the university’s indefensible overprivilege nor to uncritically pile up the sum of all evils upon it? Well, for me at least, I’ve mostly been investing all my emotional and ideological savings in the cause of public higher education.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2011/11/15/292/