You may have missed this, but it is signficant: in the middle of a global jobs meltdown, Harvard students are getting special training to learn how to deal with rejection. "It's inevitable sometimes, even if you go to Harvard," reveals one participant, in a tone suggesting a surprising new discovery. The course leader even manages to recast the reality of failure into a new kind of achievement: "We learn to recognize our bad feelings as an indication that we care, we have high standards and high hopes, and we expect a lot of ourselves and of the world" - it's as if Harvard kids even crash and burn more brightly than those from lesser institutions. The 539,000 other Americans who got their pink slips this month might permit themselves a hollow chuckle at that.
I'll confess a vested interest here: I went to Harvard, during the Pleistocene, and had a wonderful time. It was the intellectual equivalent of F.A.O. Schwartz, a place where whatever you wanted to learn was available in its biggest and best form: lectures in Government from the people who'd advised Presidents, labs where even undergraduates were working on the frontiers of science, libraries so packed with potential discoveries that the writer Thomas Wolfe, on his first day as a freshman, was found running through the stacks shouting "I have to read them all!"
What it did not have was a culture of competitive achievement. Incoming students soon learned that the quickest path to a shrivelling put-down was mentioning what a prize-winning wonder you were in high school, or boasting about how hard you had sweated for that exam. "To Harvard," in the immemorial slang, meant to excel while giving an impression of ease; those who expected praise for their high grades or their successive all-nighters were wonks (the origin of the term) and worthy of scorn. Sure, a lot of this was an ironic snobbishness, indicating our "inevitable, indubitable super-ior-itee," as the old song put it; but it also enforced a more important attitude that we all, students or not, lose at our peril.
Status, rank, standing, and achievement form only part of the human experience - and by no means the most important part. Primate studies may focus on issues of dominance (giving us useful office-psychology terms like alpha male or threat display), but that's by-and-large because these things are easiest to observe and categorize without sliding into anthropomorphism. Most of the time, primates are actually doing stuff they are interested in - looking, eating, grooming, playing - unmindful of who's hot and who's not. These things only matter if someone brings them up.
The benefit of Harvarding, in the old sense, is that it reminds everyone how insignificant their "achievements" are when compared with the real business of studying - the stuff we should all be interested in. Philosophy is a far bigger deal than any valedictorianship; Physics does not care about your National Merit Scholarship; History gains nothing from your straight As. Even sports, as we all know, remain indifferent to past reputation. When Yale's coach T.A.D. Jones announced "Gentlemen, you are now going to play football against Harvard. Never again in your whole life will you do anything so important," he was making a point the ancient Greeks would have applauded: the gods laugh at status, whether trophies past or Vice-Presidentships to come. Fate chooses, unswayed by us, a lucky few to ennoble their lives in a moment of glory. We can never know when, or if, that moment shall come. Now and the task are all that matter.
The present-day Harvard students who need to be briefed about failure are the same ones who, as revealed in a recent New Yorker story, dose themselves with prescription drugs in order to achieve "a variety of goals in a variety of realms - social, romantic, sexual, extracurricular, résumé-building, academic." They are the students who, when I interview them as admissions candidates, tell me "I've always been the best, and Harvard is the best, so I naturally want to go there" (yes... and what then?). They are the students who loudly discuss their grade-point averages in the Science Center elevator - something that, in my day, would be as welcome as discussing your bowel movements. They have forgotten, in a world entranced by status, what they are there for: to explore the vast kingdom of the mind, where success and failure have no witnesses.
Given all that, a little rejection might be salutary. Success on its own is notoriously empty, and those who merely garner distinctions perish unfulfilled. As heirs to the other primates, we are happiest doing what is before us, the work we have chosen, and doing it as well as we can. As G.K. Chesterton said, what's worth doing is worth doing badly. The saxophone solo, however halting; the poem, even unpublished; the garden that only you and the sky will see; these are, when considered closely, diplomas more deserving of a happy, fulfilled life than the Latin scroll handed out on some June afternoon.
If you enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.
