Harvard Education
Friday night, May 24, 2019
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara, CA
Have you been following the college admissions scandal? We now know that hundreds of families spent millions and millions of dollars to help get their already privileged kids into top colleges. It boggles the mind that these parents thought they were doing their kids a favor by buying their way into college. On the other hand, it is a logical extension of the way we have defined admission to an elite college as the ultimate goal of a young person’s life.
This spring marks forty years since I graduated from college. A good Biblical number. Tonight, with the benefit of forty years perspective, I would like to share what I remember about college. What was important and what was not, in my four years at Harvard.... America’s oldest and arguably most prestigious college.
I did not intend to go to Harvard. After visiting colleges, I had decided on Haverford, a very small liberal arts college in Philadelphia, where I was sure I would get a top notch education. But when the acceptance letter came from Harvard, it was so impressive, so magnificent, so seductive...and I was only 17 years old. I could not turn it down. So I chose Harvard not because I thought it would be good for me, but because I could not resist.
Once I was there, what was it like? There were big classes, and small seminars. Neither were great learning experiences. I remember the physical sensation of sitting in small seminars with other students who seemed to have come from another planet. They were so articulate, and knew so much. Occasionally I felt that I had an idea to share. I sat there, my heart pounding and my palms growing sweaty, and if called upon, I could hardly get the words out, I was so nervous.
In large classes, on the other hand, I saw and listened to Professors who I learned years later were among the most famous names in American Academia. Bernard Bailyn on the American revolution. John Rawls on moral philosophy. David Donald on the Civil War. John Finley on Homer. David Perkins on modern English and American poetry. Martha Nusbaum on Plato. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi on the Jews of Muslim and Christian Spain. Much much later in life, in my 40’s and 50’s, I came to learn that I had been sitting in classrooms with some of the greatest minds in modern America. But the truth is I had no idea at the time. I was 18 years old. 19 years old. 20 years old. I literally had no idea who they were. And of course they had zero interest in me.
In four years at Harvard, there was only one teacher who actually knew me. My freshman expository writing teacher, Tom Mallon. He was demanding, making us write a four page essay every week, which felt completely overwhelming. But each week, he would return those essays covered with red ink. He must have spent hours upon hours reading and commenting upon our essays. He let me know that he thought I was a good writer, told me that he enjoyed the way I took risks in my writing. We did not stay in touch, but over the years I began to see his name regularly in the New York Times Book Review. Tom Mallon is famous now, a widely hailed novelist. It turns out that he is exactly six years older than I am. So when he was my teacher, and shaping my life, my thinking, my writing, and my understanding of myself, I was 18 and he was 24.
Other than Tom Mallon, I had no teachers at Harvard who actually sat and taught me. I read, and I wrote, and some of what I read and wrote made a lasting impression on me....although not much really. And yet those years were four of the most formative of my life.
Here are a few experiences from those years that have never left me.
There I was at Harvard in my freshman year, 18 years old. I had done well in math in high school and so decided to take intermediate algebra as a freshman. I was pretty lost in that class, and my first quiz came back with a letter grade I had never seen before in my life, a D. I was also taking modern poetry. I had always loved poetry, and in high school had been very good at reading and understanding. But my first mid-term exam came back with another grade I had never seen in my life, a C-. Those grades shook me to the core of my soul. I did not understand what was happening to me. My girl friend suggested that I talk to her roommate, who was an English major, about how to write about poetry. That 19 year old friend sat down with me and taught me how to read and write an essay about poetry. And I swallowed my pride and asked a friend to help me in the algebra class. The professors in those classes never knew a thing about me, and I doubt I learned a thing from either of them. But in their classes I received a humbling, and I learned how to ask for help. That was my college education.
One of the sages of the Talmud commented “one can never stand upon words of Torah until he has first stumbled over them.” In college, I learned to stumble and fall....and to pick myself up.
In an interview, trying to get into the elite major “History and Literature,” I froze when the professor asked me “so what is a poem that you like?” It was not a trick question! But when I replied “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats, he followed up by asking “tell me about that poem” and I could not think of a single thing to say. That was my college education.
I took a class in jazz appreciation, which I thought would be fairly safe. But to my surprise, we received a homework assignment to write a simple blues progression. I had no idea how to proceed, and mentioned this dilemma to my friend Chuck, who was a talented jazz musician. He said “hey, I’ll write you a blues!” Which he did, and I turned it in. That was a mistake. At the next class, the teacher singled me out and said “Steve, you composed an amazing blues progression! Come up in front of the class and improvise on it.” I said, “oh no, I can’t.” But he would not take no for an answer. He insisted that I come up to the piano, in front of the whole class, and improvise on the chord progression that I claimed to have written. I will never know whether he actually thought I had composed it, or whether this was his brilliant way of teaching me a lesson. But I sat at the piano, stared at the keys, my face burning with embarrassment. Another day in my college education.
In addition to my classes, I also went to work, as part of my financial aid package, for the student run “Harvard Student Agencies.” I worked for a year cleaning bathrooms on campus, which was unpleasant but not difficult work. Then they began sending me out into Boston. I was sent to clean apartments which had been identified by the Boston Housing Authority as in desperate need of cleaning. I would take the subway to a rundown section of the city and go into an apartment armed with my bucket, sponges, cleansers, and mop. Over forty years later I remember going into an apartment in which everything was covered by a thick layer of grime. Counters, shelves, table, chairs. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Filth everywhere. And in bed, an old old woman, not moving, but alive and breathing, saying thank you. That was a day in my college education.
You cannot buy education. And while I have used my Harvard credential once or twice over the years to get somebody to pay attention to me, or to take me seriously, my real college education happened outside of class, and could have happened at any college in the country. I understand the allure of the elite colleges. I fell for it myself, choosing the Harvard name over the other school that would have represented a more mature choice. But our tradition teaches that real education, real wisdom, is a gift from heaven....coming upon us when we least expect it. And our job is simply to open our hands, with gratitude, and to accept the gift. Shabbat Shalom.