A sense of possibility

What to do with two 15-year-old girls on their winter break? Get thee to Harvard Yard! That’s what my friend Kristi and I decided, days before a week of sleepovers watching old Star Wars movies loomed ahead of us. Would we rather have the dishwasher running overtime or room service at a riverside Hyatt in Cambridge? Hmmm.

Still only sophomores in high school, our daughters are already thinking about college. Both good students, the idea of visiting Harvard came naturally to them. Why not start at the top?

As we entered Cambridge, en route to our hotel, I took the route through Harvard Square to give my fellow travelers their bearings and see a few sights.

Passing by Harvard, we saw a group of students in the yard, thronged around a speaker, presumably a tour guide. We thought of stopping then, to join this late afternoon tour, but decided to go on to our hotel instead and catch a morning group.

The next day’s Boston Globe, delivered to our door, showed a photograph of that same group of students thronging Lawrence Summers, the Harvard president, as he announced his resignation from the university. We had walked in on history, as this event marked the shortest tenure of any Harvard president.

The word in academia is that Harvard is a great research institution, but not a great undergraduate university. Their focus has always been on research rather than teaching. Summers’ downfall, apparently, had something to do with his insistence that upper level faculty teach some introductory level classes to undergraduates. He, himself, taught at the undergraduate level at Harvard, while president.

When I was an undergrad in Boston, I never ventured through the iron gates of Harvard Yard, though they were always open. The yard, and all it represented, seemed off limits to me, an impossibility.

Our daughters embraced the yard. The moment we entered the gate, their excitement was palpable. History was speaking to them. They read the plaque on the old Indian College, a beautiful old brick building, about fulfilling the Harvard charter to co-educate native and non-native Americans, and rubbed John Harvard’s shiny bronze boot for good luck.

They heard first-hand from a young senior, a blonde woman from Colorado, about life at Harvard. Living quarters for “first-years” are luxurious by most dorm standards. The freshmen live in the sturdy brick buildings that circle the yard, in suites with one or two others, each with their own bedroom. The president of the college lives a stone’s throw, or a polite wave, away from the freshman dorms, in his own handsome Georgian quarters.

The dining hall, closed to us as it was lunchtime, was described in terms the girls could vividly imagine, as the Hogwart’s dining hall in the Harry Potter books.

So the buildings are grand and the reputation still respected, but the thing I was struck by was the sense of support the institution gives its students. According to our guide, who was clearly savoring each fleeting moment of her time at Harvard, students are not simply flung into a rarified academic maelstrom, but rather nestled in the branches of an ancient and powerful tree, with deep roots. I don’t know any college student who couldn’t use a little extra nestling.

Even more surprising was our guide’s description of the curriculum, which I had assumed was pretty uniform. When you’re paying for a Harvard education, after all, you want to get the one everyone talks about. In fact, there is plenty of room to tailor one’s choices to fit an area of interest. And there is more freedom to change interests mid-stream than at many universities.

Whether Harvard will be the same place, in three years, that our tour guide described is anybody’s guess. In the interim, either of our daughters may find a small college in Omaha that speaks to her more. The fact that they both have the sense of possibility, after a peek inside the forbidding gates, is all that really matters.

By then end of the tour, our daughters were brimming with confidence. “I can see myself here,” said mine, glowing with her own sense of possibility.