Ivy, Evergreens and other Educational Botanicals

Watch out. He’s just about to drop an H-bomb.

When my friend spoke, I didn’t know what she meant. A nuclear attack at a cocktail party?

Then I understood. Harvard. The syllables mushroom clouded across the room. Har – a flash of light – vard, the sonic boom.  People twitched, averted their eyes, mumbled nervous insecurities under their breath.

Curiously, many if not all of those partaking in the conversation had stellar educational pedigrees.  A few may have even gone to Harvard, too.  But somehow the word, the institution, the idea possessed an extra-human, atomic potential that could wipe out life at a mere utterance.

How?  Why?

The world round, Harvard has become a byword for genius and truth, a beacon calling out to god-like creatures who we might only hope to be able to beg to run the world. 

Who could be so perfect?

Therein lies the problem.  Talk about a complex.

When I get off the T at Harvard Square, the air twitches with insecurity.  Sometimes it looks like pretension.  Sometimes curious East Asian tourists mask the aura as they snap devotional photographs.  But you can’t escape it.

Of course, I know some amazing and wonderfully well-adjusted people who spent two or four or more years at Harvard. 

But they’re in the minority.  The place, the people – they need to loosen up in a very big way. 

Do something crazy!  Fail.  Get a Mohawk, learn to ride a unicycle.  Have a hobby at which you’re mediocre at best.

Facebook is great, but how many more Mark Zuckerbergs does the world need, no less want?

Having barely gotten into a much less selective and much less well know liberal arts college – Reed, in Portland, Oregon – I never worried about scaring people with my alma mater. 

Certainly I’ve been pigeonholed – pot-smoking-hippy school, or always-in-the-library-never-having-fun school.  Those strike me as mutually exclusive descriptions, but Reed is a paradoxical place that truly contains multitudes.  Not always perfectly, but solidly well.

Around my sophomore year or so, I realized the importance of distinguishing between someone who has been well educated, and someone who is smart, and even more than smart.  The difference is profound.

Simply put, if someone has to tell you where she or he went to school to establish some sort of intellectual worth or to record some personal success, I’m bored at best.  Now, if I have to ask someone where they’ve studied – if they’ve been to college, what they’ve done for work or where they’ve learned the most – then I know I’m onto something. 

I realize many people have worked incredibly hard and overcome enormous odds and deserve the privilege that comes with a degree from a place like Yale or Stanford.  Yet if we’re really out to value a person’s fortitude and to embrace equity and equality, how narrow-minded we are – from Howard to Michigan State, from Providence College to endless community colleges, not to mention people who haven’t even graduated from high school – we don’t have to romanticize genius or fetishize the weak or oppressed to realize the creativity and boundless potential that exists within every one of us.

Indeed: I’m much happier to recognize an individual’s hard work, personal accomplishments, and emotional and ethical self-awareness rather than the name of a school. 

That’s certainly how I would like to be known and valued.

And, for the record, I’m a huge proponent of nuclear disarmament, for academia as well as for nation-states.  

Here’s to a bomb-free future.