Classroom disputes are common at colleges. Professors misbehave, administrators are out of touch, students protest intermittently. While most of these incidents are not enough to make even the local paper, when it happens at Harvard it is, for some reason, everyone’s problem. Didn’t get into Harvard when you really thought you should have? Here’s your essay in The New York Times. Did you feel shouted down in a debate in your politics class? The Washington Post is knocking on your door.
Should someone from Midland, Texas, know the names of Harvard professors? Should an Ohioan know the identities of protesters in Harvard Yard? Do I need to have an opinion on what level of federal funding the school gets, or its antidiscrimination policies? I am not sure, but I think that the average online American is at least aware of these things.
I admit that, at least when I had a Twitter account, I was somewhat aware of the goings-on at Harvard. If you are a white, suburban kid with good grades and an unimpressive childhood, Harvard is on your mind.
Three years into a degree at Boston University, I got a text from someone I’d met in passing months earlier: “Hey! Weird question but are there any trombone players you know that are interested in playing at a Harvard hockey game?” The team was to play at the NCAA tournament while much of the band was away, so reinforcements were needed. We drove to Lake Placid, New York, alongside the team and spent the weekend with the band. The music was great, and we had the hotel to ourselves, got to wear these funny blazers and ties, and didn’t spend a cent of our own money. At BU, music is fun but eerily corporate: There is no swearing, parties or cool uniforms. This weekend was different. A performance ran through lunch? Dinner goes on the card. There’s a 2 a.m. bus ride to get home from the gig? We’ll stay another day and leave in the morning.
The following winter, this was mostly out of my mind. I had my own college band to attend to. But, during one dark night in my dorm room, I got another text. Hey, it said. How about we just make you an account on the website, and you can come to whatever gigs you want?
I have always had trouble saying no, so that spring I extended myself as far as I could. One weekend I’d be in Bridgeport with Harvard, and in Manchester the next day with BU. I’d start the Beanpot tournament rooting for one team, then throw on a jersey to play for the other. After my own graduation, I stayed with a friend at Harvard for a week to play at the commencement exercises, sitting a few feet from Tom Hanks as he gave a terrible, ghostwritten speech. I recall it was something about students being America’s future – if only America still had a future!
At BU, when you’re done, you’re done, especially in music. You do not get to come back, except to watch. It’s one of the few traditions my alma mater has, and I meant to follow it. But I loved playing trombone, I loved band, and Harvard wanted me back – so why stop? After Labor Day weekend, days before I was to start my first big-boy job, I was on campus playing at the convocation ceremony. On Thursdays, I would get out of work and bike to campus for rehearsal. On Fridays, I’d told my boss I needed to be out at 4 p.m. for a parade leaving at 4:30 p.m., and did my best to be on time. Saturdays were all-day affairs. Football started with a parade at 8 a.m., rehearsal all morning, lunch, a halftime show and performances in the stands, a parade back to campus and a party that night. There is a strange notion at Harvard that once a hangout starts, it should last until it is impossible for it to continue. A gig in the morning would roll into dinner in the band room, some Guitar Hero, and drinks later. If we were still alive on Sunday, we’d have rehearsal again.
While the band has a somewhat official relationship with the college, like many other student groups at Harvard, it is structured more like a nonprofit than a club. It is run by and for students for their benefit and has its own money to spend as it wishes. This confuses college administrators (including those at Harvard), as it is contrary to a modern university structure in which students’ money, labor and time are at the service of the school and any form of expression must be preapproved by management.
That structure fascinated me. At BU, it feels like a strict summer camp; orders come from above, and everyone follows. (Recently, BU issued a policy restricting the public display of pride flags, and sure enough, most obeyed.) The admins would ask the band to play for 15 minutes at lunchtime, with a day’s notice, because a sports team had requested it, and we’d scrape a band together. At Harvard, the band won’t get out of bed unless it’s a weekend and there’s food involved.
At BU, a 20-year-old caught with alcohol must pay a fine, beg for mercy from a bureaucrat and attend classes geared toward addicts. At Harvard, students are free to reserve a designated dorm common area for parties (just make sure to turn the music off at 2 a.m.). Any weekend (or weekday, for that matter) during the school year, stand at JFK and Mount Auburn and you’ll hear what I mean.
As my involvement escalated, so did the responsibility. They’d gotten used to me, and I knew people, so the requests started to increase: Could you bring a trumpet player this weekend? Do you know anyone who plays tuba? Can you find someone to drive the van to the stadium? Most people I knew became familiar with texts from me: Hey, can you come to Harvard this weekend? We could use the help. There were games at which 10 percent to 20 percent of the band, one of the few organizations on campus that seems to represent the college in a public way, was people I knew – my line cook friend, BU classmates, high school friends, semipro musicians – people who are the opposite of what “Harvard” is as an idea, at least to many. Parties needed help as well. If someone walked into the function and nobody was there, they’d leave. So, they’d ask, you know anyone who would come to this? As a rule, I tried to bring at least six people. I was moving couches, preventing bathroom floods, driving vans and buying mixers for the punch, because these people became my friends, my social life, and I try to do what I can for my friends – but also because I didn’t want to grow up.
The whole act started to feel less new, less like we were pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone on campus and more like a fun fact, something we’d joke about now and then.
Sometimes, the feeling of strangeness returned. The band went to the Harvard-Yale game (one of many unimportant games stylized as “The Game”), taking the bus to Manhattan and spending the night in the Harvard Club of New York. The next day, we woke at dawn and were bused to New Haven to play for a packed stadium, gray-haired alumni goading us to take shots as we passed by. We ran through traditions, 100-year-old gestures and chants nobody remembers the meaning of, ran around the wet Yale bowl and screamed ourselves hoarse urging the team forward. Later, we had a weekendlong 105th reunion with 100 or so alumni, complete with a seriously fancy dinner at an old and secretive club that doesn’t allow photographs. (Just imagine bear skins hanging on the walls, dusty trophies from ages past and huge chandeliers.)
I realized I could get in almost anywhere just by looking and acting the part. My friends and I would go to the same Harvard bars, talk and worry about the same Harvard things: Do you think we’ll have enough players this weekend? Who’s hosting after? Should we go to Felipe’s or Grendel’s? Harvard has weird words for things, mostly because, as claimed, the school predates the coinage of most modern collegiate words such as “major.” I learned to talk this way too, and at parties, I’d see how long I could string someone along – I’m a senior, I live in Quincy House, how about you? – until a friend would deliberately interrupt to ask me how my office job was going.
Why do all that?
I told myself the band needed my help. It was true in a basic way – there was a full year where I was the only regular trombonist – but it’s not like this was my school. It’s not my business if Harvard can convene a band on any given stormy evening in October. If the school wanted a bigger band, it could provide more institutional support and admit more musicians who don’t play symphonic string instruments. (The orchestra has no recruitment problem.)
I did it because I like it. I liked to make music with my friends, I liked to wear a crimson blazer, I liked the weird gravitas of it all, the traditions and the quirks. I like private jokes, white lies and knowing smiles. But most of all, those people became my friends. They let me in, warts and all. The band’s members are – irrationally – devoted to keeping it in existence, limp along as it might.
My thought when I first started hanging at Harvard was that I would meet the next Mark Zuckerberg. By virtue of being around the right people, I’d get to visit the Hamptons for a weekend, get shares in the next great tech company, maybe date the daughter of a senator. In this pursuit, my favorite conversation topic for Harvard newcomers was asking how they got in. Which kind of cancer did you cure? Who’s your dad? The answer was, invariably, “I don’t know” or “I’m from Alaska” (Harvard tries to admit a few students from every state). Sure, signs that these kids were Type A in high school slip out – being able to solve a crossword in minutes, mentioning the 18 advanced placement classes they took – but by and large, they are down to earth and (sometimes) humble. There are certainly rich kids at Harvard, rich for weird reasons, like your father owning part of Liverpool, or a company that makes blinds, or a Taiwanese steel company, but those people are not everyday students, much less those who choose to play in the band. And the richness never seemed to make someone uncool. It was just a fact, like the color of your eyes.
I wish there was a way to explain to people, including the person I was in high school, that yes, some but not all of these students are smart and wealthy, but mostly they are normal people who had a bit of luck the day they filed their application. The idea that someone deserves to go (what the hell does that mean?) is absurd. There is no “smart enough” to go to Harvard – it is famously not rigorous – and I can tell you that there is a huge range of experience and aptitude among its students, which I think is at least partially by design. I don’t think the school would be much fun if it was populated only by kids who are the best at optimizing the metrics on the application.
I’ll be playing trombone at my fourth Harvard commencement a few days after writing this. While fun, these events are rarely memorable for someone working at them, but the 2024 exercises stood out: Hundreds of graduating students and a good chunk of the band walked out in protest of the Gaza war and Harvard’s alleged role in it. Since Harvard is more tolerant of its own students protesting than outsiders, I kept playing, though I wonder if I should have left, too.
That walkout was the culmination of a semester of tension on campus. Universities across the country were beset with Vietnam-era student encampments, and Harvard was no exception. Since the protest was in the Yard, there was consternation about whether commencement would happen at all. The gates to the Yard were shut, and nobody without a Harvard ID was to be let in. Some days, I’d be waved through just for carrying an instrument or claiming to have forgotten my ID, but mostly I had to walk around to get across campus.
I don’t think it is my place to tell the story of who these students were, what they did or why – enough articles have been written about it – but I think that what they did was so brave that it is hard to write about properly. These students had their faces and names displayed on campus and in their hometowns on the “doxxing truck.” They knew Harvard would be under immense pressure to punish them and would likely do so – many encampments were broken up with force, the students arrested and expelled – but did it anyway. I remember walking around campus and seeing national media outlets outside the gates, hunting for interviews. Money poured in from across the Western world, including from billionaires such as Bill Ackman, all with the goal of making these students leave (and, as a side goal, never find stable employment).
These students sacrificed more than I think I ever would be willing to. It was not the children of billionaires doing this; it was the regular people who I knew, people whose life trajectory and career prospects would genuinely benefit from a Harvard diploma, one they were willing to give up for this cause. To the students’ credit, weeks before commencement a deal was struck in which Harvard reinstated the students it suspended and agreed to talk about divestment. Did students force the faceless Harvard Corp. to change its ways? No, and I don’t think anyone expected that. In the ensuing months, Harvard moved to change its own rules on speech to make sure this would never happen again. The newly installed president was forced out in a Red Scare-style hullabaloo as a concession. But life at the oldest college in America continued.
The long arc of history did not, in fact, continue to bend in favor of justice and liberalism. Israel’s American backers decided that the “shake hands and walk away” deal from 2024 did not do enough to punish the right people. Trump froze $2 billion in research funding to Harvard, barred it from enrolling international students, issued a list of impossible demands (write him a $1 billion check, turn over the names of protesters, restrict professors’ speech) and showed how students who were found to have protested or even written in support of Palestine could be kidnapped and deported (including one of my neighbors).
I think people want Harvard destroyed because they know that, paradoxically, it’s an easy target.
A lot of Americans resent the place. I certainly have taken my fair share of potshots at the stereotypes we know all too well – Harvard as a bastion of spoiled rich kids, a producer of amoral consultants who fix bread prices and Supreme Court justices who are barely smarter than my friend Peter Griffin. There are great reasons for libs and reactionaries to hate on the school, given its investment practices, dominance in Cambridge and Boston real estate and failure to meet its stated social goals. A lot of people would say they don’t care what happens to it, that it’s neither their circus nor their monkeys, that it sucks anyway. I get it. But we are not being honest with ourselves. Joe Republican, car dealership owner in Exton, Pennsylvania, and Kate Democrat, physician assistant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, both hate Harvard because they secretly want their kids to go there.
This drama is only partially about geopolitics. Much of it is backlash over the low acceptance rate, because white and middle-class anxiety are the driving forces behind basically everything happening in this country. It is unfair that not everyone can go to an Ivy League school. If I had my way, Harvard would admit two or three times as many undergrads. The band would certainly be a lot healthier, and the school would probably get the elusive ideological diversity it’s seeking.
Harvard has taught me a lot about what college could be – the freedom and responsibility given to students there are incredible. Many spend more time operating their student clubs than they do in class. Students get monetary and institutional support to pursue their dreams, and the lifelong benefits from the school’s name and connections are unequaled. Every year, fresh-eyed students are flung into the strange black hole of an institution and asked to swim their way back past the event horizon, and I have seen them do it. That experience cannot be created from scratch elsewhere. There is only one Harvard, and I think it is worth saving.
One last thing: Institutions belong to those who show up. I have done a lot of showing up at Harvard and have made myself a place there. There is nothing stopping you, or anyone else, from sitting on a blanket on a sunny day in the Yard, debating the merits of Joe’s and Pinocchio’s Pizza, taking walks by the river or going to a football game. If you’re in college, go to parties, shake hands, be friendly. You never know who you’ll meet or what you’ll see. You can even audition for the band if you like. This is allowed because Harvard does not belong to Bill Ackman, the Harvard Corp. or the president of the United States. It belongs to us, and if we show up for it, we might have some say in its future.
Nicholas Marchuk is a local author and engineer. His work is available at major retailers and on his website, nicholasmarchuk.com. Comments and questions can be directed to his contact form and may be responded to in this publication.
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