I grew up in Montreal and went to an upper-middle-class Jewish day school where kids had parents who maybe owned a carpet store or maybe were dentists. And then I went to Harvard for college. And it was pretty weird.
When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don’t think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student.
The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan’s Island, it wasn’t the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr. Howell, the rich man. That was something of a revelation.
It’s funny, because what a lot of people talk about when they talk about going to Harvard is being really intimidated by the place when they arrive. I wasn’t at all intimidated by the place when I arrived—but I was really intimidated after graduating.
I arrived at Harvard from Montreal, which is a pretty fucking hip place to be an eighteen-year-old. I’d been going to bars for a while, and I was in a political theater company that did shows in lofts with homeless people and South American activists. And we went to pubs and got old gay men to buy us drinks. It was a pretty cool, fun, and exciting life for a kid in Montreal. It was a very vibrant place, and young people were really part of the life of the city.
Then when I went to Harvard, the place was full of these nominally smart, interesting people, all of whom at the age of eighteen seemed perfectly happy to live in dormitories and be on a meal plan and live a fully institutional life. And that was completely maddening! This was the opposite of everything I’d hoped for from the environment I’d be in.
By design, the university wants to be an enclosed institution, so you’re required to live on campus, which means that you’re not living in the city. You don’t have a landlord or neighbors or those kinds of things. You’re pretty much required to sign up for the meal plan, which means you don’t interact with people in restaurants or grocery stores or any of that kind of stuff. The drinking age is twenty-one, and it’s strictly enforced in the city but mostly unenforced on campus, which means if you want to drink or go to a party, you can only do that on campus, but if you want to go see a band at a club, you can’t do that.
I spent my first year trying to figure out how to participate in the life of the city in some way, but by the end of my first year I think I gave up because the pull of the university community was so strong and the boundaries were so hard to overcome.
By the end of university, I ended up living somewhere that was considered off campus—a place called the Dudley Co-op. The Dudley Co-op was located in a building that was owned by Harvard. About thirty or forty Harvard students lived there. We did our own cooking and cleaning, but we were on the university phone system and the university did the building maintenance. That’s how fully institutionalized life at Harvard was: even Dudley House, which was the organization that looked after off-campus living, provided university-owned accommodation for people who wanted to live off campus.
There actually was a small percentage of students who genuinely did live off campus—like 1 percent—but you had to get university permission. I think the explanation the university would give is that going to Harvard isn’t just a set of courses, it’s an experience and a community, and they’re interested in people being part of that community, which means living there and participating in what they call the “house system,” the different dorms students live in.
But the end result is that it makes the university into an ivory tower—I mean, incredibly so. It would be one thing if you were out in the woods, but this is Boston. In four years of living in that city I pretty much didn’t come to know anybody who wasn’t affiliated with Harvard. And I’m someone who’s interested in cities and who’s interested in meeting different kinds of people. The university is a completely isolated environment, and the fact that you’re inside a city somehow makes that more insidious and terrible.
All the parties were on campus. So when you went to a party—and that’s what you would do Friday and Saturday night, you would go to a party—the party would be on campus, which means, sort of implicitly, that if you’re a student at the university, you’re welcome, and if you’re not, you’re trespassing. So even at parties—and I went to parties for four years—the average number of people at a given party who weren’t Harvard students was zero. All of this serves to create a very weird, very contained environment.
When I was at university, it shocked me how focused so many people were about their careers, in ways that often seemed pretty narrow. I guess I knew that Harvard attracts very ambitious young people, but I was still surprised. In Montreal I knew a lot of really interesting people doing interesting things, and there was a lot less of that at Harvard than I would have expected. In retrospect it’s not surprising. At a certain level, an institution like that is going to attract people who are very good at playing by the rules.
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