His name was Yale. He had just completed his freshman year at Harvard (yes, he gets the irony) and was working as a student guide, conducting tours of the 371-year-old university in Cambridge, Mass., founded 16 years after the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock. On a rainy summer afternoon, he provided a more eye-opening look than he realized at what $50,000 (U.S.) – the annual undergraduate costs, according to Harvard's website – can buy.
Our group consisted of about two dozen middle-aged parents from around the world, some towing teenagers along. Like so many other tourists every year, we had come to soak in the romantic atmosphere of America's premier university and perhaps pique our children's interest. Harvard, for better or worse, is a place of legend, featured in countless books and films, not to mention in the shattered and/or realized dreams of anyone who ever went to college.
Yale himself was adorable, well-built and friendly, with dark, curly hair. He wore a button-down shirt, jeans and a shell necklace that would have been called pukka beads 30 years ago. He was a business major, from Florida. (He told us that a lot.) From the outset of the hour-long tour, he was determined to correct any impression we may have that Harvard's 18,000 degree candidates were nothing but nerds.
Correct it he did.
We entered Harvard Yard, a tree-filled greensward crisscrossed with paths, home to freshman dormitories and academic buildings. First stop, Massachusetts Hall. Like all of Harvard's original buildings, it's red brick and modestly grand, a physical manifestation of ambition. Well after the tour, I researched some facts about it: Built in 1720, it's the oldest building on campus and the second-oldest academic building in the United States. It housed Continental soldiers during the Revolutionary War and served as an informal observatory after a 24-foot telescope was donated in 1722.
The university's president, provost and treasurer have offices on the first three floors, and highly select freshman live on the upper floors.
Here's what Yale said about it: “Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, lived there. He once left his bathtub running when he went out, and the tub crashed through to the office below.” Yale chuckled. “I don't know anyone who lives there now.” The way he shook his head told us everything we needed to know about those nerds.
We strolled past Hollis Hall and Stoughton Hall, which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones had called home. Yale didn't mention them. He didn't discuss the seven U.S. presidents who were Harvard grads, from John Adams and both Roosevelts through John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush. Nor did he mention alumni including 50-odd Nobel Prize winners, scores of Supreme Court justices, politicians and talents as varied as William S. Burroughs, T.S. Eliot (BA, MA and PhD), Al Franken, Robert Frost, David Halberstam (the late author whose book The Best and the Brightest glorified his alma mater), Alger Hiss, Oliver Wendell Holmes (both Jr. and Sr.), Philip Johnson (the architect), Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Henry Kissinger, Jack Lemmon, Yo-Yo Ma, Barack Obama, Conan O'Brien, Sumner Redstone, John Reed (the journalist played by Warren Beatty in Reds), Janet Reno and Susan Sontag. Maybe they were too nerdy.
Oddly, Yale did mention e.e. cummings (1894-1962; BA, 1915; MA, 1916), but not by profession (poet). “She was a great lady,” Yale said. Cummings, of course, was a man.
