Lowered Sights

Dear Readers,
Some—if not many—of Harvard’s best moments seem to lie outside the classroom. You could create your own world-class education simply by cherry-picking from amazing speakers that pass through: Ban Ki Moon, David Petraeus, Oprah, Geoffrey Canada, Stephen Colbert. Even if their words are at times trite, their very presence, personality, and tone are master classes in public leadership.
But this surfeit jades the best of us; my freshman fall, I jumped eagerly at the chance to hear Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile, speak at the Kennedy School. I couldn’t believe it. Heads of state would come just to speak to students. I lined up for half an hour and happily sat in the worst seats in the house to see her. Her story, that of a political prisoner tortured by Pinochet turned pragmatic and successful president, was breathtaking.
Yet today, I find myself doing laundry or surfing Facebook instead of trekking to the Kennedy School. Some insidious normalcy has set in, where the routine and banal have edged out remarkable possibility. This evolution is pervasive among students at Harvard, from wide-eyed idealism to nose-to-the-grindstone cynicism. And unsurprisingly, it closely tracks the journey from freshman to senior.
But, I recently put my laundry aside—just for a few days—and rediscovered the intriguing narratives that emerge in the cross-current of speakers on campus. In the span of two weeks, I heard from three profoundly impressive people: Steven Holl, renowned American architect, Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, and General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each had a unique charisma, Holl in his self-assured and sweeping aesthetic vision, Rousseff in her down-to-earth poise, and Dempsey in his frank wit. But, what was more striking than their individual messages or even personal magnetism was the unspoken undertone that linked them.
Holl, an architect not exactly concerned with practicalities, spoke on the use of scale in his buildings. They were daring, ambitious, perhaps even crazy. His “linked hybrid” is a city in the sky, soaring towers joined by floating bridges complete with daycare, cinemas, and cultural venues. His “sliced porosity block” consumes an entire city block, with deep slices cut through the imposing building to provide sunlight to interior apartments. And his “horizontal skyscraper” is exactly as it sounds. They seem like the imaginings of unchained artist, but they exude an unmistakable optimism, that society can be challenged and inspired by audacious architecture. Amazingly enough, these fantastical buildings are being constructed—in China.
The story is much the same for Brazil. President Rousseff, while acknowledging the significant challenges her country faces—crime, poverty, currency appreciation—asserted a confident, optimistic Brazil. It is a nation that has never shied away from dreaming big: in the early 1960s, President Kubitschek ordered the building of a utopian capital in the middle of the country. Photographs of its construction are stunning, modernist monuments rising out of a barren savannah. Half a century later, Brazil has continued to live out the bold spirit of Brasilia: 40 million people have been raised from poverty to the middle class, and before the decade is out, Brazil will have hosted the the Olympics and the World Cup. Rousseff capped her speech tellingly, “Brazil needs Harvard as much as Harvard needs Brazil.”
After all this, Gen. Dempsey delivered the coda, declaring that “America is not a country in decline.” It may not be, but it seems that these days, we have settled for the small and the quotidian. We’ve stopped dreaming and doing big things, our aspiration for the future replaced by narrow cynicism. Acela is what we call high-speed rail, and One World Trade Center is our new architectural centerpiece. That might be how nations evolve, but I sure wish it weren’t.
Jonathan Yip