a thought for the weekend
After I wrote this week’s column about how Harvard student’s don’t take enough time to spend with each other, having conversations, challenging each other and generally being interesting people, former Dean of of Harvard College Harry Lewis sent me an email, noting that he had advocated the same thing.
He linked to a letter he wrote and sent to my freshman class that caused quite the stir. In preperation for the weekend, I thought I’d share it with you:
It may seem hypocritical for us at the same time, perhaps, to offer you Advanced Standing and to advise you not to accept it; or to explain how to qualify for a joint concentration and to discourage you from pursuing one; or to offer other opportunities and to suggest that you should not take them. But the most important thing you need to master is the capacity to make choices that are appropriate to you, recognizing that flexibility in your schedule, unstructured time in your day, and evenings spent with your friends rather than your books are all, in a larger sense, essential for your education. In advising you to think about slowing down and limiting your structured activities, I do not mean to discourage you from high achievement, indeed from the pursuit of extraordinary excellence, in your chosen path. But you are more likely to sustain the intense effort needed to accomplish first-rate work in one area if you allow yourself some leisure time, some recreation, some time for solitude, rather than packing your schedule with so many activities that you have no time to think about why you are doing what you are doing.
And remember, to some extent as Harvard and other major universities go, so goes the country. When it comes to competitive culture, we lead. So let’s lead the country to be happy and healthy, not insanely busy, money and resume-driven overachievers.
Spend some time with a friend this weekend, see you on Monday!
Comments
And despite all, you will all still be graduating with a Harvard diploma, so being in terms of the resumee, you’ll all still have a leg up on the rest of us lowly public school educated kids….so I guess the others of us out there can just suck it. Which is why I am going to Dunfermline for the weekend instead of writing my two essays. Whoops.
yeah my basic criticism in this, ‘love your harvard peers because they’re so incredible’ line is the implicit devaluation of pretty much everyone else. the flip side of thinking your harvard peers are once in a life-time-awesome is that others, (workers, the unschooled, etc) don’t have experience and insight to enrichen harvard students lives. not to be all preachy, but part of the ideological reproduction of schooling depends on those who “do well” to believe that they are better than everyone else, and therefore deserve to be respected and rich. this self importance rationalizes gross hierarchy and inequality. go crimson!
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