I began my morning, in fact, huddled behind a much longer than usual line at the local Starbucks, losing myself among the black and crimson regalia.
Once in my office, there was no escape. First there were the bagpipes. And the drums. And the chanting. And all the Latin. And bells upon bells.
If you forget you work at a University committed to educating students, the sight and sound explosion of Commencement asserts itself in glorious three-dimensions as an impossible to avoid reminder.
On this day, however, even the most cynical among us get the majesty of what faculty member John Briscoe calls "the Big H." Even better, I learned that the customary salmon mouse (a Pepto pink pudding with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream) served at lunch would not be making an appearence.
In the PR universe, my haunt, the media uses graduation time to present soul-searching treatises about the value of the modern university. In fact, it's been a year of kicking over the tombstones: the death of the book (again and again); the popping of the higher education bubble; the slow and terribly loud dying of the liberal arts (the mouth must go last); and the unbalanced, wheezing economy unable and unwilling to absorb even the best and brightest.
But wait... in what appeared to be some happy news, a study by Georgetown University declared that undergraduate engineering majors ended up reaping the top salaries. For an engineering school like us working hard to bring in more concentrators, doesn't that just make the Champagne taste all the sweeter!
And we do, in fact, use such facts to position engineering---even here at Harvard. Students and parents (especially those forking over a lot of cash), should consider the future earning potential of a major/career---especially in an era of a diminishing network of social services.
Here's a "borrowed" Facebook quip by Amy Gutman, a former colleague:
"...I have huge concern with (& empathy for) students who've taken on enormous amounts of debt on the belief that it will 'pay off' financially & are now facing lives of poverty & stress. The Wash Monthly did an excellent piece way back in the 80s about how the ready availability of student loans--originally intended to expand the availability of education & opportunity--had in fact fueled a higher ed racket wherein colleges & universities were able to raise tuition faster than inflation year after year. I just think this is wrong & vastly unfair to the next generation."A good, reasonable (and fairly standard) assessment. So, at SEAS should we simply sit back and wait for the students pour in because of the promise of a fat paycheck?
Then again, the contrarian Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is offering one better: $100k to students who chose to give up their bright college years and instead, spend their time innovating and developing new companies just like he did. Who needs higher ed when you can learn by doing! (And who didn't see the Social Network and say, "Wow, I'd much rather live in a big rambling house with a pool in sunny California than be tucked away in a musty dorm during a Boston winter.")
At Harvard, especially in engineering, we cannot readily express outrage when college is portrayed as simply "more car than you need"---especially in the light of the high fuel prices.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, dropout. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, dropout. In one of my favorite lines of all time, our former dean Venky Narayanamurti explained that "Gates spent as much at Harvard as he needed to."
(For more on the fray, join in on yet in another fun tradition, journalists who use the end of May/early June to run the famed list of college dropouts who still made it big.)
Two of our current computer science students who might have the next Facebook on their hands, are wondering, right now, whether to stay or go.
"But balancing Newsle and academic work was a challenge. Compared to writing code for Newsle, many classes felt like a waste of time. Peter Thiel's '20 under 20' program gives people under 20 years old $100,000 to work on their own ideas instead of going to college. Thiel believes that a college education isn't always worth the money, and he has been criticized for encouraging students to drop out. While we think his argument has some merit, our experience was more complicated. As students, we had access to business and computer science professors and got their advice on Newsle. We got some money from a student entrepreneurship competition, and we didn't have to worry about food or housing. We even applied algorithms we'd learned in computer science classes!"But ah ha! Here's where the nuances start to come through. And even better, the cogent points were made by two students without help from a public relations professional.
Attending college is more than just minding your major. That's even true of those professional fields like engineering that have the potential golden ticket at the end.
College is also all that "extra" stuff like meeting friends and finding future business partners. To wit, Gates met Ballmer (who did graduate) while at Harvard. They both also had access to what was at the time some very sophisticated hardware you couldn't find anywhere else.
Tony Hsieh '95, founder of Zappos, admitted he learned as much outside as inside the classroom and lab (a generous interpretation) while at Harvard.
"For me, most of what I got out of Harvard was outside the classroom, including people that I met and running the pizza business. My concentration was in computer science because that’s what I was most passionate about at the time, but I also learned to discover other passions through other classes (for example, linguistics)."So the future shoe magnate and happiness merchant gives credit to pizza, in part, for his success rather than learning to be a programming pro. Yet, Harvard played an essential role. What better more captive environment to test out a business than a campus? An incubator within another incubator. And of course, the liberal arts even snuck in, influencing Hseih in ways he likely didn't expect. Intellectual proximity matters.
And faculty, ala Mr. Deeds, do inspire students to dream big. One meaningful encounter can be life changing. Really. That's not marketing speak. Here's a snippet from Pixar's Danielle Feinberg '96.
"I was sitting in Professor Joe Marks’s computer graphics class. He showed a couple of the Pixar short films one day, and I absolutely fell in love with computer animation. It was like everything I had ever tried to do, taken 10 million levels up." (Joe, a SEAS alum will soon head up Disney's R&D office in Cambridge.)Ending with the notion of "love"---and loving what you do seems appropriate. Writer Jonathan Franzen gave the 2011 commencement address at my own alma mater, Kenyon College, and spoke about his unexpected love (of birdwatching).
In my mind, whether you pursue engineering or exobiology, college can be---and I think should be---a place to fall in love.
On a nearly perfect Boston day, an alchemist's delight of wind and sun, I certainly feel it in the air.
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