The most shared article in my Facebook feed garnered a dozen “likes” for everyone who posted it. I had to read it 4 times because I just could not figure out whether it was for or against Occupy Harvard.
Alexandra Petri was somewhat of a humor celebrity during my time at Harvard and she currently writes a humor blog for the Washington Post, where this piece was published. While I don’t know her personally, I’ve always found her hilarious and I was ready to get behind everything she writes. The beginning of the article is hilarious, and I’m chuckling along until the end when I had to pause. She’s being self-consciously ridiculous to be funny right? Not just…ridiculous? I really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. That’s why I read it 3 more times!
Meanwhile, the nation rolls its eyes. “Harvard students chanting that they are the 99 percent?” people ask. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Go to class.”
It’s not a bad idea.
Perhaps this is an oversimplification. But surely the events since 2008 have been a vivid and painful reminder of how dangerous it is to entrust the world economy to people without a firm grasp on economics.
Petri is referencing a staged walk-out of the introductory economics class Ec 10, a tactic that garnered the protesters much (deserved) derision for its clumsiness. I do not vouch for how firmly those people grasped economics, but I would bet my entire bank account that most of those people did indeed sit through Ec 10 or its equivalent at some fancy private university. The irony is thicker than the wad of cash you’d get if you withdrew my entire bank account.
The article continues:
Don’t occupy the Yard. Occupy the libraries. Occupy the classrooms. You have just four years to devote to actually getting a grip on some small portion of the vast array of human knowledge. Do not spend any of them in a tent, surrounded by other people who have no better ideas than you, “engaging in dialogue.” It smells peculiar there, and you could be in a red-brick building next to a bust of John Adams, learning something. If you actually want to come up with a way to remedy the injustice, it is the only thing to do.
Go to class.
What struck me as funny about this paragraph is that everyone at Harvard always maintained that the real worth of going to Harvard was not classes but interacting with other people. Harvard supports a culture where extracurriculars often takes precedence over academics — that’s why you have students sacrificing grades to put together a daily newspaper or tour the world with a comedy show or run a homeless shelter. The intensity of extracurricular life is predicated on the idea that experiences outside of the classroom are meaningful. Certainly there are some students more invested in academics than others, but I doubt many graduates will claim that their most meaningful time at Harvard was spent in the classroom or god forbid under the fluorescent lights of Lamont Library. To claim that there is nothing to learn without an expert authority figure to run the show does not sound like Harvard, where students routinely ran international conferences and million dollar budgets for campus organizations. If some students choose to spend their extracurricular time staging protests, good for them. That’s not what I did and not what I would do, but its their time. I think we can agree on this without agreeing to their chosen tactics.
It was troubling for me that this paragraph smacked of condescension and even more troubling that so many of my Facebook friends (people I respected!) swallowed it without hesitation. Perhaps it is just too easy to hit that “like” button. A part of me likes to think many people didn’t even make it to the end of the article because the alternative — that people would be so eager for critiques of Occupy Harvard that they’d support even an incoherent one like this — reflects even more poorly on Harvard.
