College: The Selfish Life

By DANIEL M. SULEIMAN, February 23, 1998

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Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but
cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain
One of America's greatest attributes is its ability to foster and nurture competing
conceptions of the good life. The hardest part for many of us, however, is trying to figure
out just what the good life is. The other day, a friend of mine claimed to have figured it
out: "College is the good life," he proclaimed.
The logic goes something like this: on the academic side, we go to class for a few hours a
week, read interesting books and articles and maybe write a few papers during the
semester; on the extracurricular side, we play a sport, act a little or teach grade school
children how to dance. The rest of our time in college is divided between eating as much
as we want, meeting new people our age every day and having interesting conversations
over a couple of beers.
But one attribute Harvard students are cursed with is that we imbue so much of what we
do with Significance, and this makes college not seem as easy-going as the description
above implies it is. That is, we think most of what we are doing here bears large
consequences for the rest of our lives; and this raises stress levels to an often unhealthy
height.
What we study at college could theoretically determine our futures; certainly pre-med
students depend on their performance, and computer science and engineering
concentrators leave with skills they will be able to use immediately after graduation. But
even these students are not locked in by the choices they make today.
The most important aspect of a college education is the way you learn to think--about
ideas, about the world and about yourself--not what you decide to study. Even theses,
those roughly 100-page projects that seniors are completing this month and next, which
are the culmination of four years of academic growth, are inconsequential. They don't
matter for the rest of our lives, they probably won't be related to what we end up doing
and for the most part, they will not contribute to the relevant field of scholarship. They
only matter--and this is of course very important--for the maturation of their authors.
Theses, not unlike the thousands upon thousands of pages of Core course papers handed
in every semester, may, in the words of one government professor, not be worth the
paper on which they are written.

But seniors do, and should, obsess about their theses. Our ability to place as much
importance as we do every decision we make and every paper we write is one of the
indulgences college allows. And this indulgence can be seen in most aspects of college
life. College students are selfish, caught up in their lives and usually their lives only,
because they can be; our activities (even our altruistic ones) primarily serve us: they help
us grow and develop our conceptions of the good life. And they don't matter too much in
the grand scheme of things. Students are expected to make mistakes, and we can change
our minds (our concentrations, our plans, our careers, etc.) when we wish.
When I asked Dean of the College and McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R.
Lewis '68 whether or not he thought college was an essentially selfish period, he
answered with a resounding "No."
"At Harvard," Lewis wrote in an e-mail message, "we try to create an environment where
students can be as selfless as possible...[B]y comparison with the world outside and
beyond Harvard, where people get on career tracks, want to do well in order to protect
and provide for their loved ones, become geographically immobilized, etc., I think
college--this one anyway--provides a rare moment, when most students are at a critical
stage of their development, to open up rather than closing down and drawing in on
themselves."
Lewis was adamant about defending the role of the institution in fostering cooperation
among students: Participation in "choral music, Model UN, debating, theatre, yes even
journalism...teaches pride in excellence, but also lessons in the whole being greater than
the sum of the parts in a way that I hope people remember after they graduate."
But learning these values does not preclude students from being selfish as well. It is, in
fact, the institutional structure that enables students to concentrate on themselves. To
the same question I asked Dean Lewis about whether or not college was a selfish period,
Henry Rubin, a lecturer on social studies, responded, "Most definitely. [College] is one of
the last times that you get the kind of intensive institutional support for guiding you
through life choices that will matter to your life chances...Most of all, you haven't yet
made the kinds of decisions that `lock' you into any particular course of action."
My mother was a chemistry major before going to graduate school in French. My father
was an economics major before going to graduate school in political science. I'm a social
studies concentrator and I'm not sure what I want to do--and though I will stress about
this decision, to the point of destroying my conception of college as the good life, the nice
thing is that it doesn't matter just yet.