Surviving in Oz

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Harvard is a lot like Oz. Since getting here I’ve been dazzled by bricked roads, bourgie shoes, and bad weather. Everyone gets lesser version of Dorothy’s culture shock: thousands of the country’s highest achieving high school students won’t form a typical campus community. And beyond the more tangible differences—less school spirit, miserable parties, great funding—there’s perhaps the more amorphous idea of “culture.”
Let me come right out and say that Harvard’s culture is a bad one. Our intentions are often admirable, but there’s an atmosphere where students shirk a lot of personal responsibility. Instead, too often we appeal to Harvard’s administration and other groups for institutional changes. This top-down path of problem solving isn’t a bad one, but we can’t forgo occasionally solving issues ourselves.
As much as we like to put ourselves on a moral high ground, as a student body our own actions are often reprehensible. We rally to complain about University Health Services, but ignore our depressed friends; we push ourselves to do our very best in every class, but disregard struggling students; we put every ounce of effort we have into extracurriculars, but rarely attend others’ games and events. Not every student succumbs to this self-focused attitude, but our community has a lot to hang its head over.
It took me a while to figure this out. Harvard students are the first to critique injustice, but intellectual concern is rarely followed by personal action. It’s a stark difference from my conservative, midwestern hometown; no one cared much about problems on a theoretical level, but when someone needed help it came quickly. Plenty of students from comparable parts of the country have offered similar complaints about Harvard’s community. Why this difference?
It’s a cultural issue, and one that envelops many good-hearted students. When the HPR decided to take on “The Future of Conservatism,” most writers looked at it through the lens of political ideology and nothing more. But having moved from a small, blue-collar town to this uppity urban utopia, I’ve come to realize conservatism is just as much a mindset. Individual responsibility, family values, personal humility—these aren’t merely political catchwords. Your parents beat them into you throughout childhood and you hold onto them. Not many people here have these values; as a community, we lack the personal empathy to create a culture that inspires much pride.
At Harvard, we’re liberals in our heads but not in our hearts. Our ideals of collective action fall to the wayside when they involve individual effort. We hide our real selfishness through proud talk of wanting to change the world but follow with little that will make it happen. Conservative areas might not have the same benevolence when it comes to helping people via government action, but their individual responsibility shines through when called upon.
As a Democrat, I see the imperative that “The Future of Conservatism” not leave behind these old-fashioned values that many liberals roll their eyes at. Not only are these ideas compatible with more progressive ideologies, they’re essential to creating the left’s vision of America. This is the sort of thing Bobby Kennedy meant when he talked of how we can’t measure America’s worth merely by Gross National Product; our American spirit is what makes us great. Sociologists call it “social capital,” and since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America it’s been credited as one of America’s most important qualities.
New trends in American politics and thought may alter the right-of-center political thought, but hopefully the culturally conservative mindset remains; Harvard and much of the county can stand to learn a thing or two. Charity can’t entirely replace government, friends can’t replace therapists, nor can Kansas replace Oz. But there’s certainly room for both.